Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

cliffc999 · Nov 12, 2022

One world. One world set against an empire of thousands. One lone world set against trillions of Human and alien beings who do not share our history, any of our cultures, or any of our values. Victory seems impossible. Perhaps the best we can expect is survival. Yet to achieve even that, we must be... one world.

– Kanshi Bannerjee, first Secretary-General of the Terran Confederation (2124)

I stared at the large, burnished plaque hanging on the waiting room wall in the testing center, emblazoned with the most famous from Secretary-General Bannerjee's speech on the founding of the Terran Confederation, the one that every Terran schoolchild had already heard repeatedly. Ever since the Confederation had passed the Foundational Education Laws decades ago, it had been impossible to become an accredited school anywhere in Terran space without meeting strict requirements for curriculum. Every school had to offer education in at least one language in addition to their students' native tongue, immersion in Confederation history and human-rights principles, and exposure to at least several other foreign cultures. The social engineering aimed at instilling a globalist/Confederationist outlook in future generations, not a nationalist one, was unsubtle enough that even an idiot couldn't miss it.

Then again, when your home planet had gone straight from the global environmental and economic collapse of the 21st century into making first contact with the Vilani Imperium less than a decade after the invention of FTL drive at the dawn of the 22nd century, and then only barely survived three wars with said interstellar empire despite being so massively outnumbered that some Terran military strategists still weren't certain how we'd survived, that same idiot could also figure out why the United Nations took the step from multinational alliance and coordination center into a true world government by rewriting its charter and becoming the Terran Confederation. And why so much social and political effort was expended on ensuring that neither Earth nor her daughter colonies ever fell back into the old nationalist and ethnic hatreds that had produced the Collapse in the first place. Terran humanity had barely survived its own mistakes even before we'd ever met the Vilani. If we fell back into those old patterns when they were still out there on the frontier waiting for an opportunity, an inevitable conquest would be the best we could hope for.

Because it's not as if they'd find us impossible to assimilate into their culture so thoroughly that we'd eventually forget our own. The Vilani, for all that they were extraterrestrials, still weren't aliens. They were as human as we were, with only minor variations. But since as near as anyone could figure they'd apparently been taken off of prehistoric Earth by some mysterious bunch of aliens who weren't around anymore and resettled on a planet almost 200 parsecs away, minor variations over that many millenia of genetic drift were only to be expected. As well as an entirely different society, culture, language, etc, etc.

So in the face of that kind of threat, and despite the misgivings of many, Terra had chosen to trade a portion of its freedoms in return for assured security and so things continued to this day. Oh, it wasn't a dictatorship, like the Communist regime that had ruled my country back in the Cold War era. Confederation citizens had freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and voted for elected officials who represented them among their national governments. Many nations - including my own, Poland - also allowed their General Assembly delegates to be chosen by popular election, even if some still had their own national governments appoint them. And the only requirements to vote were be of legal age and not certified mentally incompetent or serving a prison sentence. Likewise, the strict requirements of Confederation humans-rights law meant that it was almost impossible for any nation-state to run an old-fashioned kleptocracy or dictatorship without falling substantially short of at least one of the minimum provisos, even if politics was still full of politicians - with all that implied.

Of course, that didn't change the part where in order to avoid a prison sentence, citizens had to avoid breaking the law. And right now one law in particular was very much on my mind - the one that mandated at least four years of government service for every citizen not suffering catastrophic physical or mental disability, as soon as they hit age 18 and graduated secondary education. The one that I was currently sitting in a Public Service Bureau office along with many of my classmates waiting for the next round of comprehensive aptitude testing for, so the PSB's computers and planners could determine where our particular talents could be assigned to best serve the Confederation's needs. I'd already finished the medical and physical tests, and now it was time for the gut-cruncher; the Comprehensive Academic Testing cycle. Multiple exams spread out over several days, each one as tough as a semester final exam had been in school, and all of them taking in combination and computer-analyzed and correlated to profile exactly what the Confederation thought you'd be best for. Exams that were so infamously rigorous that secondary education didn't even bother having final exams for Senior Year - they just took your CAT scores straight from the PSB and used those.

"Sophia?" a familiar voice broke into my ruminating.

"Here!" I answered quickly, turning to face the entrance to the testing rooms as I stood up and grabbed my datapad.

"Relax." Madam Sokolowska - my homeroom teacher - assured me. It was cheaper for the PSB to just use a school's own teachers as assistant exam proctors during the annual surge of graduating secondary-ed students, supervised of course by the permanent testing center staff - smiled at me. "I've been taking my students here for nine years, and with only two exceptions I've brought them all back safely. Officially." she trailed off impishly.

I rolled my eyes at the obvious joke, but acknowledged that it had at least done a little bit to take the edge off my nervousness. Normally a clerical job this routine would have been done largely by automation and an interactive computer agent, the labor situation being what it was, but the PSB apparently thought that having the 'human touch' for all its exam proctors would help keep the test scores of entire generations would tank due to nerves. Either that, or they wanted humans backing up the automated systems when it came to anti-cheating measures, given how important the CAT was to every citizen's future.

"Officially!" I tried to joke back, as I handed her my datapad and my personal com for safe storage - personal electronics of any kind were not allowed in the testing room - and followed her and the PSB proctor into the back. A quick check of my ID card and retina by the PSB computer, a sworn statement from Madam Sokolowska that yes, this person actually was her student Sophia Nowak from the Pulaski Secondary Education Center, a step through the scanning arch to ensure I wasn't trying to smuggle any electronic help in, and Madam Sokolowska went back to the waiting room to set up the next student while the PSB proctor showed shown to the little one-person cubicle that I would be working in for the next couple of days. Pausing only to start the tutorial for me, he then closed the door behind him and went back to the waiting room to help check in the next student.

"Sophia Nowak, welcome to the Comprehensive Academic Testing cycle. Please present your retina scan for verification." a smoothly-synthesized voice spoke from the terminal. Two ID checks, one done by humans and another at the testing terminal itself by the automation? I wondered how many times someone had tried to sneak in a 'ringer' to take the test for them that the PSB would go to these kinds of lengths as I leaned over and stuck my face up against the eyepiece mounted to one side of the terminal. After a moment, it beeped and the light turned green.

"ID confirmed. The date is May 15th, 2166, and you are in Public Service Bureau office Number Two for Plock, Poland. The time is 0749 hours." the computer spoke. While true AI was still only a dream for science-fiction writers, they'd started figuring out how to make natural-language voice interaction software for computers even before the Collapse. Names like 'Siri' and 'Alexa' flitted vaguely through my memory from history class, although the voice interaction today was much more sophisticated than those crude efforts. Unless you were a cybernetics specialist - or dealing with a Vilani computer, given their entirely different design philosophy towards user interfaces - you didn't need to know the first thing about programming syntax or software interactions to use a computer for any everyday purpose, you just needed the ability to talk.

"You will have a total of sixteen hours to complete all of the CAT exams, in two eight-hour shifts spread out over the next two days. An hour will be provided for lunch. You may work at your own pace and spend as much time as you like on any question or any section of the test, but you are cautioned that there will be no credit given for incomplete work. It is recommended that students pace themselves accordingly, and that if you are stuck on a particular question you move on and answer all questions that you can readily solve, then go back and continue to work on the remainder. The testing software will automatically bookmark all incompletely answered questions for you. The exams are designed to take a median of twelve hours to complete for a student of average ability, so you may rest assured that pausing for reasonable breaks will not threaten your score. Should you experience any service interruption with the testing terminal, the time lost will not count against your total time to complete the exam. Assistance may be sought from the exam proctors at any time by pressing the 'Help' button provided to the left of the terminal, but proctors may not provide assistance with answering exam questions. Do you have any questions, Miss Nowak?"

"No questions right now, thank you." I answered politely.

"Understood. Testing terminals will unlock and the examinations will begin in nine minutes, forty-four seconds." The terminal display switched from the PSB's official government logo over to a countdown display, and I sat back to wait.

Nine minutes until I began the exams that would determine the rest of my life. Which government service I'd be selected for in the Draft, at least half of what would determined what degree of college education if any I'd be eligible for after I finished my public service - the other half being determined by my public service record, of course - all my opportunities and possibilities for the future, and it all came down to here. I'd had my eighteenth birthday earlier this February, but until I finished the CAT exams and began the first day of my Draft service I would not be a legal adult. The cusp between childhood and the rest of my life, and it all began here.

And in my case it was particularly worrisome, because if I couldn't qualify for a full-ride scholarship somewhere then I would be stuck in bottom-rank vocational jobs for the rest of my life. Normally all it would take to get some kind of college, even if not a first-rank school, would be testing anywhere above "certified moron" and having the money to pay for tuition... but that was the problem. The money, that is.

My family had only moved to the city of Plock when it had become the new capital of Poland in 2147. The Vilani attack on Terra during the Third Interstellar War - the one and only time they'd actually made it through the frontier defenses to get as far as Terran orbit itself before they thankfully had to withdraw - had not done anywhere near as much damage as you could hypothetically do to an inhabited world if your spacefleet had control of orbital space, but over a dozen cities had still been destroyed by Vilani orbital nukes before they'd pulled out and millions of Terran lives had been lost. My parents had only lived to have me at all because despite their both being from Warsaw they'd both been working outside the city at the time. Father had been a Terran Navy rating stationed on one of the orbital platforms - thankfully one of the ones that had survived the Vilani attack - and Mother had been working at the starport over fifteen kilometers outside the blast radius.

But both of them had been from the city, and both of them had lost their families and everything they'd owned to the Vilani bombing. And my older brother Michal had died with our grandparents before I'd even been born, as they'd been baby-sitting.

So even with Father's muster-out benefits and Mother's having a quite good job with Kaufmann AG, setting up an entire new married life for themselves elsewhere used up almost everything they had. Between that and the fact that my older brother's arrival and then mine meant Dad couldn't work full-time before... well, if left to our own devices and what my parents could scrape together for an educational trust then I could just about afford community college. That's why I wanted to ace this exam more than I'd ever wanted anything in my life.

Which is why I had just a few butterflies in my stomach as the most important test of my life was about to start-

User Selected: Nowak, Sophia Anna
Celestial Forge v2 (Modified): Initialized

I gaped incredulously at the glowing letters hanging directly in my field of vision. What the frick? Hologram tech wasn't this good, and the PSB wouldn't be paying for it in a routine testing center if it was and what was a 'Celestial Forge' anyway-?

The Celestial Forge is a pan-cosmic augmentation system designed to allow users greatly enhanced capabilities for crafting, building, research, and discovery, including access to resources and knowledges not normally available in their native universes.

I blinked at the 'native universes' bit and rapidly came to the conclusion that either someone was not only using some type of highly experimental hologram projector on me but was trying to gaslight me into thinking I'd slipped a gear somewhere, or else I actually had slipped a gear somewhere and had let exam stress push me straight into hallucinating off my nut.

I sighed inwardly at realizing that 'hallucinating off my nut' was what had to be going on here. Greeeeeat. Well, at least I don't have to worry about passing the CAT or getting a good pick in the Draft anymore, because I'm going to spending the next few months in the neuro ward while they figure out if they make a pill to fix what's wrong here or if I'll just have to be certified officially loopy for the rest of my life. Despairingly, I reached out to push the 'Help' button and call the exam proctors to summon medical assistance-

You are neither hallucinating nor insane, Sophia Nowak.

I glared at the floating text, as I angrily thought that this is exactly what an insane hallucination would be telling me right now! Also, the fact that whatever this is is responding to my thoughts entirely rules out the holographic practical joker hypothesis, so-

It would be rational to test your hypothesis before making an irrevocable life-changing decision, would it not?

And how exactly do I do that, smart guy?

The 'display' opened up in front of me to show a list of choices, complete with point values next to them. The format was that of a standardized computer display that I was already familiar with from a lifetime of use, so I thought about touching one of the line items and was unsurprised to see it expand into a context-box full of descriptive test. As I looked, the point values next to each one had a strikethrough put through them.

Choose one perk to start with, at no cost. If nothing happens after you make a choice, then you know that this phenomenon is merely a hallucination.

I looked quickly at the countdown clock. I had maybe five and a half minutes before the exam started, by which point I wanted this thing to either have finished proving its bona fides or conclusively demonstrated itself to be merely a figment of my imagination. So I started reading my way through the list as carefully yet quickly as I could. Because on the off chance this thing was real, I certainly didn't want to waste my first pick on something useless. Especially not when 'the first one is free' strongly implied that the next ones would have a cost, and I had no clue what the cost would be or how painful the process of earning the whatever currency you paid those costs in would get.

I noted that all of the options I was being given were apparently just an extract from the full list of whatever, as virtually all of them had a point value of '100 CP', with the only exceptions being 50cp or free. And if everything on the total list was like that then you wouldn't need point values - just 'free', 'little', and 'big'. Using three-digit numbers implied you had a wider range of numerical values. So, the free sample starter is only allowed to be picked from among the cheapest options in the catalog. Well, that was... reassuringly normal, honestly.

Wait, what the hell was that option? My eyes locked in on one particular block of text and grew so wide that I imagined they were sticking out of my head like stalks. And this was only 100 points? What the hell were the big point options, then?

OK, choice made! Even if I never get another pick from this thing ever, this thing is way more than I'd ever hoped to see in my lifetime and that plus some hard work will be everything I need to get myself a good life. Right, Well-Researched it is! I reached out mentally and 'clicked' on the option to select it, and-

And I took my first step into a realm of thought the likes of which I had never faintly dreamed.

My memory become perfect and absolute. Everything I'd ever learned, even the things I'd never been aware of learning or had let slip out of my mind the day after I'd crammed them in there, was now at my instant and perfect recall. I 'felt' everything in my head automatically cross-referencing itself, providing legitimate comprehension of the topics as well as rote memorization. And, just as the text had promised, I gained access to an entire library's worth of academic knowledge on top of all my own life experiences and schooling. In a single instant I'd gone from being a hard-working but only somewhat non-mediocre secondary-ed student to someone with the knowledge of almost a dozen separate PhDs, in topics ranging from history to world cultures to engineering and physics.

Holy shit. This was real. It was all real.

Hey, Celestial Forge? What the hell are you and why did you pick me?!? I screamed inwardly at it.

That information is not currently available.

Was that supposed to be a 'I can't tell you?' or a 'I won't tell you?'

That information is not currently available.

... so, that's a "won't". Great. Mysterious otherworldly entity of vast and unknowable powers and resources straight from a sci-fi holovid, reaching down to a teenager barely an adult and handing them stuff for some unknowable purpose without telling them anything about how or why. My newly-granted knowledge and everything I already knew about the scientific method and simple basic life skills came together to tell me that the two most probable scenarios here were that I was a lab rat or that I was being set up as an unknowing pawn to do something that would get in the way of some other entity, peer to the one currently manipulating me, without even knowing that I was doing it. Because you couldn't use your own mysterious entity mightypowers to mind-read a secret that the other party didn't even know.

Honestly? With the choices laid out like that, I was hoping for lab rat. But I certainly wouldn't know one way or the other - or if it was option None of the Above - for quite a while yet, and now that I'd accepted something from this "Celestial Forge"and plugged into my head, I'm pretty sure that I was now committed.

I took a minute to keep myself from starting to hyperventilate and tried my best to focus and be rational and tactical about this. What should I do know? Regardless of the long-range factors I couldn't do or know anything about yet, what should be my immediate first step?

The terminal went ding! to indicate that the countdown had expired and that my Comprehensive Academic Testing cycle had now officially begun.

Okay. Yeah. I could certainly do that.

* * * * *

"I can't believe it!' Mom hugged me tearfully as we all stood around looking at my CAT results in the official e-mail. "I'm so proud of you!"

56th percentile physically. 99th percentile academically, with National Honors to indicate that I'd had not only exam results in the top 1 percent worldwide but that I'd had the highest test score in all of Poland for my particular exam cycle. I might well have had International Honors for being the best worldwide - with the ridiculous boost that Well-Researched had given me, I could have answered every test question perfectly if I'd wanted to - except that I'd deliberately fluffed a few to try and avoid being too high. I wanted to ace the thing, not trigger a cheating investigation as to how the heck a student with a previously undistinguished record had broken every testing curve there was. In fact, I was a little worried about the 'National Honors' tag I saw there, because - okay, I'd gotten straight As in school because I'd had good study habits and had worked my butt off to the point I basically lived inside my books, but my IQ tests were not those of a genius. So I may have spiked too high here.

"I guess all that late-night studying paid off, hmm?" Father said, giving me a manly hand on the shoulder. "National Honors. Well, that means the Draft is wide-open to you, honey. They'll let you basically have free pick."

"Well, free pick of anything that my physical scores don't drag me down on, at least." I tried to play it off. "But then again, I'm a bit on the small side for a girl and never really did sports, so..." I shrugged.

"And modest, too." he smiled down at me. "So, had any thoughts of what to go for?"

"Originally? If I couldn't get an academic scholarship I was going to try for the Navy, because the veterans' benefits would set me up academically even if I didn't qualify for a full-ride scholarship on test scores. But I'd never expected a 99, let alone National Honors." I did my best to sound as incredulous as I felt. "I... am going to have spend some time thinking about the options I have now, because I'd never expected to have them."

"Sensible." he nodded.

"Well, that's why they give six weeks after getting your exam results to make your Draft selection." Mother reassured me. "So you should have more than enough time to research your choices. And of course your Papa and I will give you as much advice as you ask for."

"Along will all the advice I didn't ask for." I threw back with a quirk of my lip, and she nodded back cheerfully.

"Ah, she knows us too well!" Father chuckled, and then both my parents turned somber - suspiciously so, given the moment.

"What's wrong?" I immediately picked up on the mood shift.

"We didn't tell you about this before because we didn't want to interrupt your studying or affect your exams." Mother said. "But of course we were going to tell you as soon as we could, and I suppose now is the best time." She paused and continued. "I got a job offer. An actual entry-level management position, not just administration. It would pay more than twice what I'm earning now."

"If it's that kind of boost then you're not talking about a promotion to management, you're talking about switching employers." I realized immediately. "But who would offer that kind of-" My newly enhanced brain immediately put together all the pieces. "Wait, that kind of raise would have to be at least partly hardship pay!" I said, shocked. "You're talking about taking up a position on one of the colonies! About leaving Terra!"

"And now I'm seeing how you aced those tests." Father said, and I noted in passing just how right he was without even knowing it. "That's exactly what's going on."

"A corporate headhunter from the High Frontier Development Consortium approached me with a recruiting offer." Mother confirmed. "Full relocation expenses, a subsidized home loan to set up on a new world, and a base pay plus frontier hardship premium that would almost double our earnings even before we factor in that your father would have much better job opportunities as a technician where we're going as well. We... as much as we'd miss Terra, we really can't afford to pass it up, honey. I already turned down a similar offer last year, but they came back with more money."

"Last year I was heading into the most important year of my schooling, and you didn't want any disruption." I said. "But now I've graduated, and with a higher ranking and more opportunities in the Draft than any of us ever dreamed of. In addition to the whole 'legal adult, time to leave the nest' part, for the next four years minimum I'd be going wherever the Confederation sends me anyway. So if ever there was a good time for you to pick up and move, this would be it."

"I'm glad you see it that way." Mother said, and her and Father relaxed in relief. "And of course we can still keep in touch-"

"Wait, High Frontier?" I blurted suddenly as I remembered something. "You're talking about relocating to Nusku, aren't you?" I continued. "That's the colony that High Frontier has gone all-in on developing and exploiting!"

"And they're having a major expansion into the orbital shipyards and starport there, funded by the Confederation buildup." Mother agreed. "That's why they have this position on offer."

"Yes, but that buildup is because Nusku is right on the Vilani border!" I said, worried. "Hell, it's a conquered planet! We only took it away from the Imperium ten years ago! You'd be outnumbered almost twenty to one by Vilani!"

"The Vilani are as genetically human as we are, they merely have a different culture." Mother shut me down firmly. "And yes, it's a culture whose rulers have attacked us repeatedly and destroyed Warsaw and-" She stopped and drew a deep breath. "But the Vilani living on Nusku are peaceful farmers. Nusku was a rustic border world for the Imperium for over a century until it turned out to be positioned smack dab on one of the only two jumpdrive routes between Vland and Terra. The ones still living there are assimilating into the Confederation as thoroughly as you or I have."

"You hope." I muttered darkly, still internally freaking out at the idea of my parents even considering moving to live directly on top of the main Vilani invasion route into Terran space, let alone be surrounded by them-

"Remember that our people were once ruled by evil tyrants once too, Sophia. Even to the point of having to serve in their armies." Father said firmly, referring to the old days underneath the USSR and the Warsaw Pact that not even the most multicultural education initiatives had yet to soften the treatment of in Polish schools. "That didn't mean we were like them, or that our country didn't become an entirely different place when we were finally freed."

I firmly reminded myself that I hadn't even been born yet when Warsaw burned, but that Sensor Technician 3rd Class Adam Nowak had been helping guide anti-ship missiles into Vilani cruisers on the day that Earth had been bombarded. Just because I'd gone with him into the ruins of Warsaw on salvaging runs when I'd been younger and still sometimes had bad dreams about the cityscape there, just because the Vilani were the reason I was an only child, that didn't mean-

"Yes, Father." I said. "But it's still such a long way away. We were doing all right financially before, weren't we? Is something this drastic really necessary?"

"Financially, we were keeping our heads above water." Mother conceded. "But we weren't doing much more than that. I admit that emigrating to Nusku is a big step, but this is the best chance we've gotten in years."

"But-" I began.

"But we'd be living directly on the invasion route." my father the Confederation Navy veteran acknowledged. "Trust me, I have not overlooked that. But you know why the Third Interstellar War ended, right?"

"The Saarpuhii Kushuggi who'd led the drive on Terra withdrew his forces in the face of our counterattack, right?" I answered, before frowning as I began to make connections- "Wait. Why didn't he reconsolidate his forces and make another push?" I asked, as I'd never thought to ask the question before. "It's not as if the Battle of Terra had broken his fleet, we'd merely wounded it."

"Because he was politically unable to reconsolidate." Father answered. "Now, we only found this out several years after the war-"

"If it's classified, should you be telling me about it?" I said quickly.

"ONI declassified the analysis last year. High Frontier actually included a summary of it in your mother's recruitment package, for reassurance." Father continued. "The short version is, unknown to us until the Free Traders brought back word after the war is that at the same time the frontier governor - the Saarpuhi Kushuggi - was busy making his drive on Terra, the Vilani were having at least a limited civil war of their own on their other frontier. And the shift in Vilani Imperial politics that made - well, to skip over a lot of speculation, Saarpuhi Erasharshi was on the wrong side of those politics. So he had to abandon the war and head back to the sector capital as quickly as he could, before his enemies could bounce him out of his position entirely. And there he remains, without remotely the support he'd need to sanction another invasion of Terran space. Particularly not after the casualties he took last time."

"That won't last forever, Father." I analyzed. "Eventually he'll either get all his influence back or else get replaced by another Imperial appointee of who knows what kind of power base and motivations. Lame ducks don't survive in politics forever, that's why they're called lame ducks."

"True." Mother agreed. " But if something like that does happen, it will take years. And I'm only committed to a two-year contract initially, and if the situation looks like it's going that far south..." she nodded.

"Plus, Nusku is being turned into the biggest fortress in the Terran Confederation. That's part of why High Frontier and all the rest are recruiting so aggressively. Heck, more of our fleet is already there than here, and by the time the military buildup is finished they'll have system defenses at least matching Terra's. The entire reason we kept Nusku at the end of the last war is because it is the chokepoint - jumpdrive ships simply don't have the range to get to the Vilani from here or vice versa without using either Nusku or Procyon as a waypoint. And now we own both fortress worlds." Father finished. "Given how unsuccessful they've been when they had better opportunities, it's really not likely at all they'll try again any time soon."

"We barely survived the last several times, and they weren't even using a percentage of their empire's full strength." I said quietly. "If they ever do, then fortress world or no fortress world-"

"If they ever could, then they already would have." Father said reassuringly. "That's one of the reasons your mother and I put faith in the analysis of the Vilani's lack of internal cohesion - if it wasn't at least mostly true, we wouldn't be here."

"I suppose I can't argue with that." I conceded. "But I'll still worry about you."

"You worry about yourself, dear." Mother said and kissed me on the forehead. "And that's enough talking about weighty matters for tonight. We can get started on working out what you'll do for your Public Service tomorrow, all right?"

"Because for tonight, there's a celebratory dinner out there with your name on it!" Father said cheerfully. "So get changed, because we've got reservations at the best restaurant in town."

* * * * *

I'd managed to put my worries out of my head for a couple of hours as Mom and Dad took the academically conquering heroine out and feted her appropriately, and bragged to suitable acquaintances and friends, and then we came back home and went to bed. And I didn't bring up the topic of Nusku again because I knew them well enough to know that their minds were already made up and as much as they loved me, I was not going to get a deciding vote here. And rationally speaking, they were not taking any gambles on Nusku that millions of Terran citizens hadn't already decided to and they couldn't all be idiots, and neither would the Confederation government whose strategists had chosen to go all-in on colonizing Nusku and making it a border wall in the first place. So, let's hope that newly expanded brain or not, I was the one who was wrong.

Oh, and speaking of a newly-expanded brain...

Hey, Forge! You there?

This interface will always be on-line, but communication outside of perk selection will be very limited.

Not very chatty, are you?

Information beyond the minimum necessary for function is of necessity highly restricted.

... riiiiight. So, in the category of 'minimum necessary for function', where's the user manual?

Tutorial information substantially beyond that which has already been provided is not deemed necessary.

Seriously? The 'sink or swim' routine? I don't even get any warning labels? If you're supposed to be all about crafting and forging, then how do you not know even the basics of sound engineering practice? Step one of which is, make sure that the first thing all users understand is what not to try doing!

Forge options deemed excessively hazardous and/or grossly incompatible with your universe, such as things conventionally referred to as "magic", are already under access restrictions. Verbal or textual cautions against using them are not considered necessary.

... uh-huh. But you haven't even told me what those point values mean, let alone how I earn points!

Possible methods of earning points are time awards, scenario rewards, and quest rewards.

'Possible'? You got anything a little more definite than that?

Quest Granted!
A Rising Thunder
Objective: Advance the Terran Confederation's tech level to be superior to Vilani Imperial Standard Technology in at least one militarily significant area before the start of the Fourth Interstellar War
Reward: 1000 CP, Terran Confederation Victory
Failure: Conquest of Nusku and Procyon by Vilani Imperium, Terran Confederation defeat and armistice

I choked off a panicked scream only barely in time to avoid waking up everyone in the house.

* * * * *

Author's Note: As my regular readers know, I've been stuck on my ongoing story ("The Unconquerable", on the NSFW forum here) for over a year, and I had to abandon my prior Celestial Forge story ("The Light of the Forge", on SB) because that was the story I'd been in the middle of writing when my father died and, well, the association just won't go away.

But looking back, I also have the part where whenever an SI or CYOA story of mine hits the 'Empire Builder' stage, I start losing my feel for it. I need more practice at doing such things, and so one objective of this story is to try and give me that practice by setting up a story where the internal narrative is all about one girl trying to change the fate of interstellar empires because she got a spoiler on the canon ending, and it sucks.

(To be fair, the Forge hasn't told her that Earth wins the Fifth Interstellar War, and she's a native of the Traveller Interstellar Wars setting with no meta-knowledge, so of course she reacts like this).

But yeah. Basically, I need to write something, anything, to get back in the flow of writing at all again, and I want to work with the Celestial Forge some more, and I need to at least try an empire building story of some kind, and so, here we are. So, we'll see if I can finish it this time.

Which, in fair warning, I have less than 50-50 odds of doing. But that's a known hazard of being a fanfic reader, and I was up front about it, so, let's see what happens.

Unspent CP: 0
Purchases: Well Researched (Lords of the Night - Liches)

cliffc999 · Nov 12, 2022

This fic wil be using the Celestial Forge v2, with these houserules:

* The protagonist, Sophia Nowak, will have free choice from the menu options presented to her by the Forge interface.
* All options that require magic to exist will be removed, because the Forge doesn't want to import magic into this particular non-magical universe. So they won't even be on the menu for Sophia to see, let alone pick.
* Likewise with all options I feel would immediately break the fun. The Forge wants the MC to at least feel like she has a choice, as well as avoid entirely dictating the agenda for its own purposes, but it certainly wants to operate within some constraints. So if she doesn't pick an obviously desirable option when she logically should have, it's very likely because it was hidden on the menu.
* CP will be earned by quest completion and/or arbitrary 'I think enough significant has happened in the story' passage of time, not strict woudcount.

In short, I am avoiding RNG entirely and picking whatever I think works for the story the best. Y'all don't like that, well, it's what I've decided to do anyway. (add) I would like to think Master of Tech and his "Forging Wonders In A World of Injustice" for giving me the idea of granting quest CP in the Celestial Forge instead of wordcount CP.

What perks were selected in which chapter and the text description of each will be maintained in this post, for anyone who needs more info than the in-character text in the story provides.

Perks Selected

Introduction - Well-Researched (Lords of the Night - Liches)
Chapter 2 - Genius Intellect (SyFy Combined Continuity), Programmer (World Seed)
Chapter 3 - Inert Ceph Technology (Crysis)
Chapter 4 - Bolthole Protocol (Honor Harrington)
Chapter 6 - Ragnarok Proofing (Battletech)
Chapter 7 - Black Computer (Lucy)
Chapter 8 - PhDs (Fantastic Four)
Chapter 9 - Transhuman Protools (Generic Cyberpunk)

Well Researched (Lords of the Night - Liches) (100cp) - The truth of the matter is that, no matter what you're doing, someone else was doing it before you. People say, don't reinvent the wheel, but the wheel has been reinvented countless times. You are good at avoiding having to reinvent things already made or discovered, though.

Your mind is like a steel trap. Not only do you never forget anything, you're good at instantly putting everything you come across into context. This won't make you instantly cross-reference it with something from a completely different context, but when you think on things and try to figure something out, find a solution, or need something out of left field you can quickly scan across your entire body of knowledge for something that could help.

This comes with you already being well studied on a huge range of topics, in this jump and all future ones you go to. Think of it as roughly ten doctorates' worth of study on a wide range of subjects, with a new set each new jump.

You can leave minds that might actually be greater than yours in the dust, as they try to achieve something from first principles that was figured out by an obscure sage thirteen centuries ago, who only ever put his findings down in a single journal that has been gathering dust in some corner of a minor family library ever since.

Genius Intellect (SyFy Combined Continuity) (400cp) - You are one of the greatest minds to ever live. Well, that might be a touch hyperbolic but you are most definitely deserving of the title genius by local standards, which are higher than most. Your raw mental processing, calculating, and problem solving ability is at least one, and usually several, orders of magnitude above the common man. Try not to let it go to your head.

Programmer (World Seed) (100cp) - Through hard hours spent slaving over a hot keyboard you have learned the art of programming. You could write a program for pretty much anything. Please don't try to steal peoples' bank accounts.

Inert Ceph Technology (Crysis) (100cp) - Within this small vial is a delicate sample of a Ceph commander unit, once active but now 'dead'. The nanomachinery is still active at some level, but it acts without intelligence nor connection to the Ceph hivemind, making it relatively safe to handle. It's not exactly a gold mine of every possible Ceph technology, but studying it can yield tremendous advances.

Bolthole Protocol (Honor Harrington) (400cp) - While coming up with unbelievably advanced new designs may not be exactly your forte, what is is the reverse engineering of the same. You need only spend a few moments working at something to get a basic idea of how it works, and only get faster from there. No matter how advanced or obscure the technology, you can eventually work it out, with a thousandth the time and effort it would take anyone else.

Ragnarok Proofing (Battletech) (600cp) - You're fully versed in all aspects of Battletechnology - with all the knowledge to reproduce it given time, tools and parts. This may involve an unfortunately long chain of tools to make the tools to make the tools, etc., but it is possible. You can also modify existing technology to include the most staggering benefit of Battletechnology: the fact it remains useful even after centuries of use and probably several near misses with nuclear weapons. Oh, it might need repairs or wind up being broken down for parts but an astonishing number of parts will still work no matter how much of a beating this technology takes.

Black Supercomputer (Lucy) (400cp) - Everyone needs one, really. Or they should have one anyway. Unlimited storage and borderline unlimited processing power, omni-compatible I/O jacks, indestructible, immune to malware, and with crystal-clear wi-fi wherever you go, it also has the most intuitive, perfect UI imaginable and an operating system that's magically compatible with pretty much anything you could install. You could even install an AI into the operating system if you had one available, although this item does not come with one.

It's conveniently portable and morphs into any computing device you wish with just a thought. Mainframe workstation, pro gaming desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, smartwatch, whatever. Either way its functionalities remain the same even if the exact details of the UI might differ from form to form. If it's lost or left behind, you can summon it to you with a thought. In future worlds the internet connection remains, but only to the current jump's internet equivalent.

Lastly, it comes with a limited perception filter that guarantees that no one will notice any of the special features of your device unless you wish them to, although they will still be able to see that it's there.

PhDs (Fantastic Four) (100cp) - Now this is the most obvious thing for you to have, isn't it? You have no less than three separate PhDs, covering any three areas of science you want. You're a leading expert and genius in each of these, a true giant in the field. But more than these, you find you now also have documents, proofs and complete records for any other degrees or qualifications you're, well, qualified to hold. So long as you have the ability, you find that whatever is needed to indicate this just appears, complete with a full story behind it. These records are entirely genuine, and are treated by everyone just as they would any other similar documents.

Transhuman Protocols (Generic Cyberpunk) (600cp) - The things we could do if only every advance wasn't riddled with unseen dangers and hidden consequences. If they're smart they'll listen to you. You can take any technology or procedure that you understand and easily figure out the flaws, pitfalls, drawbacks, and unintended or negative consequences, and as long as you put in the time you'll figure out how to get past them. Whether it's ensuring cybernetic augments don't result in lethal rejection from the body, a gene-modification doesn't make the body eat itself from the inside out with cancer, or that a device to transfer a mind leaves the same person that went in and not just a copy, or just working out the kinks in something you'll find a way. The future is an uphill battle, and there won't be time to make it if you spend it stumbling.

cliffc999 · Nov 13, 2022

How soon?!? How soon, dammit!

No matter how much I inwardly screamed at the Celestial Forge or tried every query I could think of to shake loose or trick even a hint from the quest system prompts, it remained stubbornly silent. The Forge was clearly telling me things only when it felt like talking, and carefully curating anything that it said so that even trying to datamine it for hints was basically useless. All I was getting was just enough to prod me in a certain direction, and then nothing. Particularly nothing that even began to gave me a clue as to what kind of deadline I was working under here!

Yeah, the 'I'm a pawn' theory is definitely starting to edge ahead of the 'lab rat' theory right now.

The sole bit of foreknowledge that I had been gifted with was that the hope that the Vilani would finally stop trying to conquer us was in vain, and that at some point a Fourth Interstellar War would happen. And that if I didn't do something about it, Terra was going to lose.

No pressure, right?!?

After I stopped hyperventilating and started seriously trying to figure out what the heck I could do about this, I felt that Well-Researched thing I'd bought earlier today doing exactly what its description promised it would do - let me quickly scan across my entire collected body of knowledge looking for things that could help solve the problem I was concentrating on. Which honestly wasn't much right now, given how thoroughly in the dark I was working on. But now that I was actually thinking, I did remember the most important thing of all.

So, I screwed my courage to the sticking-place and went to wake up my parents.

Proving to Mom and Dad that I hadn't lost my mind was as simple as revealing some of my newly-acquired technical knowledge and abilities. Because while I was a straight-A student and one of my school's most infamous study hounds, they knew full well that I did not have a PhD in physics or total recall. Or at least, I hadn't had them yesterday. But while neither of my parents had PhDs Dad had been a sensor tech in the Navy, which meant he had a very good technical education narrowly focused in the specific field of long-range electromagnetic scan equipment. Hyperspectral cameras, passive arrays, microwave-laser scanning radar, he'd operated and done maintenance on them all. So he had just enough of an optics and physics background to know that I wasn't bullshitting him when I suddenly started laying out the kind of waveform analysis calculus that even the engineering officers would have used a computer for. And being able to demonstrate that I now had an eidetic memory was as simple as letting Mom go fetch one of the antique paper books Dad had salvaged from the Warsaw ruins that she knew I hadn't read in years, if ever, and having me recite back any randomly selected page letter-perfect after I'd just skimmed it once.

Which left me with the hard part of the conversation.

"A Fourth Interstellar War." Dad said, his face a mask of shock.

"That's what it said. And sure, it's some mysterious vast unknowable that blatantly has its own agenda in playing enigmatic oracle, but..." I sighed.

"But it's undeniable that something extraordinary is happening, and that it would be arbitrary skepticism to only believe the parts we liked to hear and ignore the rest of it. Until it bit us on the behind." Mom finished.

"Yeah." I agreed. "If we swallow any piece of this, then we have to swallow the worst part along with the best part. Or else we're like the proverbial idiots who think that if they turn off the fire alarm, there won't be any fire."

"Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I can back out of the contract negotiations for Nusku now." Mom said pensively. "I'd even already given my notice at my old job. It was all over but the final signing."

"I'm not sure if you should back out." Dad surprised me.

"Dad, your whole reasoning about Mom taking the job on Nusku was based on the evaluation that the Vilani wouldn't attack again." I said. "And now you know that you'd be living right on the invasion route!"

"No, it was based on the evaluation that the Vilani wouldn't attack again soon." Dad corrected me gently. "And-"

"And we have no idea when that attack will be coming!" I continued.

"Exactly. We have no idea." he finished firmly, and I saw Mom pick up on whatever the heck Dad was trying to say and nod along with him.

I blinked incredulously. "Wait, you're literally volunteering to be mine canaries?"

"Wherever the Confederation stations you, you'll have access to mail and official news services." Dad analyzed. "And you might even have access to internal government sources of information, depending on your job. But unless you volunteer for a frontier posting, and actually get it, you won't have a chance to talk to people who have actually been in the Imperium recently. No opportunity to receive the earliest possible warning of any major shift in Vilani attitudes by talking to people who've been beyond the border. Or to people who live on the border, and who like any frontier colonists anywhere have every motivation to pay the most careful attention possible to what's going on around them."

"Without us needing at least one at-home parent for you any longer your father could start full-time work again, as well." Mom thought out loud. "On one of the Naval bases, as a civilian contract technician for the sensor systems. Which would give you opportunities to pick up all the info you could at the workplace."

"You two are being depressingly and unfairly logical again." I groused, momentarily comforted by the familiar rhythms of a Nowak family discussion. "Okay, okay, I get what you're saying. And... it makes as much sense as anything else. But please don't sign any long-term contracts. And as soon as you two mine canaries start smelling the gas, you get out of the mine."

"You've got that right." Dad nodded emphatically.

"So, next problem. What the heck am I going to do?" I said. "I mean, before the whole 'Fourth Interstellar War' spoiler dropped I was just going to serve my time and then go on to a brilliant career of some kind in academia and R&D, but..."

"But you're going to be expected to finish four years of Public Service before you even see a college, and National Honors or not you'll be an entry-level person expected to go where she's told and do what she's told." Dad said. "And you can't even try going to college first and deferring Public Servuce until afterwards, because they closed that option out years ago."

"Yeah, both the Confederation and private-sector employers love having four years of actual work history and not just test scores to judge people from when making hiring decisions, so now everybody does Public Service before college, no exceptions." I sighed. "Even the scholarship students, because whether or not you can actually do productive work in the field on top of just having good test scores means they pay less scholarships to college goof-offs." Like any good teenager, I sighed heavily at the cosmic unfairness of grown-ups actually being sensible again. "Which means I either spend four years in a holding pattern when we have no clue how much time I even have before I hit the deadline, or I figure out how I can possibly get the time and facilities - and trust! - to start doing advanced defense research when I'm either a junior enlisted tech or an intern."

The room fell silent as we all metaphorically or literally rubbed our chins and put on our thinking caps for a minute, until Mom spoke. "She's just not going to get those kinds of opportunities during Public Service unless her chain of command chooses to give them to her. So, the problem we need to solve is to figure out how we get them to do that."

"Simple. I do something conspicuously brilliant." I replied. "The problem is that so far my only boost is being an encyclopedic synthesist, like out of one of those old Heinlein novels. Which is great for acing the CATs or being a generally knowledgeable person and good thinker in general, but doesn't mean I'm going to invent any new tech miracles right now. And I have no clue how soon the Forge will give me a next boost, or what it will be."

"But that helps." Dad surprised me. "Oh, not in finding an immediate solution, but in clarifying the problem. If you can't invent the needed tech advancements right now, then you don't have to worry about trying to do them right now. What you need to do is work on setting yourself up so that after the next boost finally drops, you can easily capitalize on the opportunity."

"So I... get next to someone who is already involved in that kind of research, do my best to look like the Next Young Prodigy so that I'm taken seriously if and when I get something else to bring to the table, and when the Forge decides to actually give me something then I bring it to the table?" I followed along.

"Well, without more than the most basic security clearance - which is all you're ever going to see when starting out in Public Service at your age - you'll never get alongside anyone involved in actual defense research. But it's not too early to start working on impressing someone reputable in the scientific community, preferably in a related civilian field." Dad corrected me mildly.

"Sounds good to me. So, which positions did Public Service offer you to choose from again?" Mom asked. "Because we'll need to start going through them all very carefully."

"No, what we need to do now is go back to sleep." Dad yawned. "We've still got six weeks to figure it out, and we'll want the clearest possible heads when we do. Fourth Interstellar War or not, the world will still be here in the morning."

* * * * *

Any attempt on my part to suggest a posting that would mean I could join my folks at Nusku was strenuously argued down. Likewise, any suggestion that I try my 'entry-level access' strategy in the Armed Forces was likewise nixed. If the existence of my brain was really the sole difference between Terra's victory and it's defeat in the next interstellar war, then it was imperative that I not take any unnecessary personal risks. Not even ones like 'living on the border tripwire' or 'hazards of peacetime military service'.

And of course I wasn't blind to the part where my parents were saying this because like all parents everywhere they wanted their child to outlive them by decades, but that didn't change the part where the overprotective nogoodniks were actually right this time.

So, within those limitations the best idea that our collective heads could come up with was the terraforming project on Peraspera. Located approximately two parsecs away from Terra, it could be reached with a single hop by a ship with a jump-2 drive. Even if you were limited to a jump-1 drive, it was still close enough to the Prometheus colony at Alpha Centauri to reach Terra that way. So I wasn't getting too far away from Terra, and even better, I was on the side of Terra away from the Vilani Imperium.

And that was about the only thing Peraspera had to recommend it, because it was otherwise an uninhabitable rock with a total population of approximately 13,000. Peraspera was early enough in its planetary formation that its atmosphere was still an unbreathable mix of nitrogen, nitrogen oxides, CO2, and all sorts of sulfurous gases. Most of its permanent staff was either planetologists or biologists studying the evolution of primitive life in such an environment, or engineers doing advanced field research in life-support systems. Even Vilani tech, with all their thousands of years of incremental improvement and bug-fixing, had never seriously gotten into the problem of setting up a self-sustaining life-support cycle in an unbreathable and corrosive atmosphere without "cheating" and using constant imports of oxygen and biomass. It had been simpler for them to just ignore such inhospitable rocks and concentrate on refining their processes for life-support systems in vacuum environments, seeing as how the universe was 99.99999+% full of that.

But Terrans thought differently, and our approach to an obstacle wasn't so much 'look for an easier way around' as it was 'climb over the wall or bring it down with sapper charges', and so Peraspera had had an experimental outpost there since even before the Third Interstellar War devoted to a long-range study of finding ways to 'speed up' the oxygen formation in its atmosphere and turn a world much like Terra had been a billion years ago into a world much like Terra today. After all, a new Terra-type planet that close to Earth would be invaluable even if our descendants would only see it centuries later.

But its main value to me was the same thing that had sent every other sane applicant running in the other direction. Notably, the part where it was an undermanned and desolate outpost light-years away from Earth that had virtually nothing to recommend it. The Public Service Bureau's reaction to my actually volunteering for one of the PSB slots there was somewhere between "Wait, you're actually interested?" and "Are you sure you've read the entry correctly?" Especially considering that my ridiculously high CAT score meant that I had potential openings ranging as high as being a junior intern at the Secretary-General's office in New York itself. For someone with that kind of opportunity to volunteer for a hardship post that had always been filled at the grunt level via "We need three volunteers - you, you, and you!" was, to put it charitably, considered just a wee bit odd.

We'd seriously considered that Confederation HQ internship, or something comparable to it, before we'd reluctantly come to the conclusion that nobody there was going to do anything with a cute young intern except pat her on the head and send her back out to fetch coffee. For all that they talk about the back-channel corridors of power, those channels only opened to people who had a lot more gray hairs, or prestigious degrees, or longer resumes, or more influential relatives than I had. Especially given that my lack of Top Secret security clearance would also mean I wouldn't be allowed anywhere near any of the meetings where really weighty matters were going on anyway. And as Dad had pointed out I'd certainly never be allowed inside any laboratories doing defense research, not even as a bottle washer, which left that option out too.

Because the real purpose of Public Service was to ensure that every young adult out there got four years of being forced to work hard for a living, show up on time, etc, etc., and maximizing the odds of their developing suitably responsible citizen habits thereby. As well as maximizing the amount of raw entry-level labor that could be applied to the ceaseless building and infrastructure development projects of the Confederation as a whole, because when your entire culture was only one losing war against a vastly larger opponent away from extinction then you had entire generations spend their lives toiling away as part of a long-range build-up and expansion and you liked it. But that meant that your initial Public Service tour was, 99+% of the time, about proving that you could shut up, do what you were told, and put your shoulder to the wheel. So, not the best environment for trying to stand out as wanting to be an exception to the rules.

But in an isolated research outpost out in the deep black? If there was anywhere that seniority and class lines would break down as far as possible, that would be the place. With only thousands of people total in the entire solar system, then chain of command or official job slots or not the reality of the situation would be that every willing pair of hands that could work would be put to work. And official credentials or not, the more skills they showed on the job then the more they'd be asked to use those skills. Almost any odd knowledge that I showed, if it was at all useful to their mission, would likely be adopted and encouraged. So if I was ever going to have a chance to impress actual scientists with my own genius before I finished spending years and years getting letters after my name, it would be in a place like this. Because if you were going to be the squarest of square pegs then you really had to do your best to find a square hole, no matter how unusual a place it was located in.

In addition, even if the Peraspera idea was a total bust on the 'scientific breakthrough' idea it still had something else to recommend it. Notably, the part where due to it being a major hardship outpost it qualified you for double Public Service credit. The old US military had had a policy where anyone assigned to their Antarctic base back during the Cold War was treated as if they were serving double time - every year you spent there counted as two years towards retirement, complete with being given double pay. Public Service had adopted that idea and adapted it to its own worst and most remote postings. So by volunteering for this duty I'd be finished with my Public Service in two years, not four, meaning that even if all else failed I could still get into college and start blazing my trail from there as quickly as I possibly could.

Given that my parents would be leaving for Nusku about a month after I left for Public Service, we had a lot of things to take care of. Arranging to sell the house and most of the furniture, putting the few antiques and irreplaceables that wouldn't be shipped to Nusku into long-term storage on Terra for me to eventually reclaim, saying goodbye to friends, etc, etc. In my particular case Dad also spent a few weeks cramming every bit of nonclassified knowledge from his old training as a Navy sensor tech into my head, even to the point of tracking down and redownloading all the available e-texts that he could find, if it hadn't already been put there by the Forge. The best strategy we could think of right now for my early breakthrough into defense research was to pass me off as not only a genius but a daddy's girl who'd absorbed her father's tech manuals and everything else all her idiosyncratic self-study could put in there all her life. Not that acting a role as a sort-of obsessive bookworm would be a challenge for me, seeing as how I, uh, kinda had been one for most of my life.

But sensor technology was certainly a field of military R&D, so I could at least enter the picture as already interested in such things and showing myself to be a self-starter in them.

* * * * *

They hadn't told us going in that even the civilian Public Service roles had to go through boot camp. Although in our case it was called 'prep camp', and its ostensible purpose was to ensure that everyone met a minimum physical fitness standard and basic teamwork exercises and preparedness exercises which would be highly useful in any field of endeavor. Oh, it wasn't military at all, oh no! You never even saw, much less touched, a weapon!

Yeah, right. I knew more than enough history, particularly in the focus of 'evil empires that invaded Poland that one time', to remember what most of the people around me had never seen in a textbook. Notably, the little trick the Nazis had played during the era that Germany had still been pretending to obey their forced demilitarization after World War I. Ostensibly a national reconstruction effort, it conscripted large amounts of healthy young men for civilian construction work and rebuilding. So the physical training was clearly to ensure they had the fittest workforce possible, and the teamwork drills were for morale and organization purposes.

And the part where they'd already gotten 75% of military boot camp training and could get the rest in several weeks of dedicated weapons drill and cramming, meaning they could all in theory be mobilized as troops in about a quarter of the time it would normally take? Well, they'd been hoping that the Allies wouldn't notice that part. And largely they hadn't. Heck, our "prep camp" had even giving us all basic vacc suit training. Which at least would be useful to me given where I was going, but when at least 80+% of the initial Public Service postings never got off Terra itself? Yyyyeah.

But, I managed to get through the eight weeks without needing to be recycled, and graduated in the best physical shape of my life - not that that was saying much. And so with freshly-acquired novice skills at basic vacuum survival and zero-G maneuvering - not that even spacers used that much nowadays given that artificial gravity generation had been invented in 2052 - I'd gone through a couple more weeks of specialty training for people who were going to be assigned to remote outposts like me, packed my bags up to the maximum weight allowance, and now I was waiting to take the grav shuttle on up to the starship that would take me to where I'd be spending the next two years of my life.

Achievement Unlocked: See Lightning And Hear Thunder
(Successfully Graduate Public Service Preparation Camp)
Reward: 100 CP

Oh, there you are, Forge. Been radio silent on me for weeks and now you speak up? Well, at least now I know something about how I'm going to learn points to buy stuff. Got anything else you want to get off your chest?

A conspicuous silence in my mind greeted me, without even its snarky 'Further information not available at this time' macro.

Yeah, figured.

The shuttle called for us to board, and I managed to snag a window seat. I could have easily connected my datapad to the shuttle's public datanet hotspot and pulled a superior view from its external cameras, but like every other human ever I ignored that in favor of jamming my nose up against the transparisteel to look out an actual live window at actual live... space.

I blinked away a tear as the shuttle boosted straight through the atmospheric interface and the sky faded from blue to black, and the shiny blue curvature of the Earth became visible below me. I'd never been up before, but now I had officially graduated from groundhog to vacuum worm. Like tens of millions people before me, I'd left Mother Earth behind - for all that I planned to return someday - and reached out to touch the stars.

The High Frontier. The millions upon millions of uncharted stars that comprised our galaxy, one of only God knew how many galaxies in the universe. Once, mankind had looked up at that star-studded infinity and dreamed that an endless adventure waited for us. The ancient 20th-century flatvid Star Trek was still a classic that all sci-fi fans knew of, a classic milestone of Terran culture that enscapsulated the innocent dreams and wonder that our ancestors had dreamed of as they took their tentative first steps into space.

Achievement Unlocked: One Small Step For Sophia
(Begin Your First Voyage Into Space)
Reward: 100 CP

But that had been an innocent dream, of a prior century. Because when our first FTL expedition had met the Vilani at Barnard's Star, we'd learned that the skies were not free. That our elder cousins had already reached the stars over two thousand years before the Chinese had even founded the first dynasty, and that their empire of hundreds of stars stood between us and that entire branch of the spiral arm. And that they saw us in the same light as those same ancient Chinese would see some small, insignificant tribe of border barbarians - to be ignored as non-persons existing beyond the outbounds, or to be crushed by their army and assimilated into their empire as peons who would no longer have any of their own language, culture, or history.

And the last time the Vilani had tried, they'd come so very close to succeeding.

Never again.

I took a deep breath and turned away from the window, pulling my thoughts back to focusing on the task ahead. I'd just found out about at least one method of earning more CP, so I concentrated on mentally opening the Celestial Forge menu to see what my options now were. I read through the list - or at least the limited selection that the Forge wanted to show me this time, since I really doubted that its entire list had only a dozen choices on it total - and then closed the menu without spending anything. It would be better to get to Peraspera and see what my opportunities there actually were first.

Although we called them 'starports', a place like the one my mother had worked at was properly called a downport. The larger worlds, whenver possible, would separate their starports into an orbital facility - the highport - and the groundside facility, the downport. This is because gravity wells were the deepest things in space, and over time the fuel expense saved by not having to take an entire large starship all the way down the well and back up again was more than worth the cost of constructing an orbital station. Many types of ships couldn't even land on planets at all, and the smaller vessels that could were only built that way because of the need to service planets and outposts too small to have to highports.

So my first venture into space was on a mere orbital shuttle and didn't go any further than Armstrong Highport, one of the several large orbital docking stations around Earth. I checked in there and was directed to meet the ship that would take me on my first-ever interstellar journey.

The Beowulf, despite its mythologically glorious name, was about as humble as an interstellar spacecraft could get. A Hero-class merchant ship, she was effectively 200 displacement tons of interstellar cargo truck. Indeed, the Hero-class freighters were a Vilani design - and one so common and unremarkable that the Vilani didn't even give them names, just registry numbers. The 'Type A' freighter, as the Vilani had designated it - it's designation as the Hero-class by Terrans was an example of how early translator software occasionally threw up the most entertaining glitches - was a simple design they'd used for centuries for cargo runs to minor or backwater worlds that didn't have a major enough trade route going to them to justify sending one of the big bulk freighters. It's only saving grace was that as it was intended for frontier and off-route service, it had a fully capable Jump-2 drive instead of a short-legged Jump-1. Entirely unarmed and too slow in realspace to run away from anything substantially faster than a slow walk, they were considered so unremarkable by the Vilani that they hadn't even asked for them back as a condition of the negotiations at the end of the Third Interstellar War.

And with our Navy not having much use for them either, the Confederation had basically dumped them all onto the used starship market cheap and in like-new condition (say what what you would about Vilani, they didn't cut corners on maintenance). And being actually very well-designed and cost-effective in their particular niche, the design had caught on with both the large corporations and smaller and independent operators to the point that the Vilani were bemused that us barbarian Terrans were not only building our own Hero-class ships in our yards but were ordering as many from Vilani space as they'd sell to us.

So, in hindsight it wasn't surprising that the regular supply run out to an outpost like Peraspera would be on one of these ships. I mean, what I was I expecting, a Chicago-class patrol cruiser?

"Sophia Nowak, passenger, reporting as ordered ma'am!" I said to the middle-aged woman in a ship's jumpsuit with a sleeve patch reading CMS Beowulf who was watching the longshoremen load cargo modules.

"At ease, kid." she said amusedly. "Public Service, huh?"

"First day out." I agreed sheepishly.

"Well, you're not in prep camp anymore and you're not in the military, so you don't have to snap to. Alice Wilkins, ship's purser. Give me your datawork and I'll check you in."

I handed her the datachip they'd given me with my prepaid passage and travel docs, and she slotted it into her own datapad, looked at the results, had me confirm my ID with my thumbprint, and nodded. "OK, you're logged in. Departure is tonight at 1930, everybody is to be aboard and with hatches tight by 1900. Until then, feel free to run amok on the station with your last day of freedom... but don't get tossed in the drunk tank or you'll miss your ride, and then your Public Service supervisor gets to find somewhere even worse than where you're going to send you. I see you already got your basic vacc suit and spacer orientation so we don't have to do that, and the rest of your passenger orientation we'll take care of after we lift. Sound good?"

"Yes ma'am."

She tapped her datapad. "And, according to my freight-tracking system your belongings are under the weight allowance and, except for your carryall there, have already arrived been boxed in with the rest of our cargo. It's probably in one of those containers right over there." she waved at the loading crew as they were busy wrestling yet another cargo container up the ramp on their grav-pallet. She held up the datapad with one particular section already highlighted. "That everything you checked in?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Right. OK, that's everything I need. See you in a few hours." She turned away to get back to her job of inventorying the stores being loaded aboard, and I pondered what to do with my last afternoon of freedom before I headed out.

Yeah. Definitely not Star Trek.

I spent my last time on Armstrong Station doing a combo of hitting the usual tourist experiences and eating the traditional last hearty meal. No alcohol, though. It was legal now that I was an adult, the Confederation drinking age being 18, but there's a reason Purser Wilkins reminded me not to overindulge - 'graduate Public Service prep camp and take the first opportunity to legally overindulge and end up missing your ship' was such a common thing for newly-minted adults turned loose from 8 weeks' of prep camp that it was one of the most common holovid cliches in sitcoms. No need to be one in real life. Besides, Dad had considered 'know how to handle her liquor' a valuable life skill for a young woman so I'd tasted Polish vodka before I was sixteen and learned how to deal with it before I was seventeen. Space station beer might as well be soda pop as far as I was concerned, so why bother paying extra?

But as routine as the experience was for the crew of the Beowulf it was still my very first interstellar voyage, and as the only passenger they had on this run and a green kid on her first voyage aside the officers were apparently feeling generous about it, so I was surprised to actually be invited to the bridge for the entry into jumpspace. I'd expected to have to watch it from the viewscreen in my cabin.

"Permission to enter the bridge, sir?" I called out, after stopping and knocking quickly three times on the edge of the open hatchway.

"Permission granted." called back an unfamiliar voice in a very familiar accent, and my face locked into an expressionless mask as I fought down an instinctive flinch. Doing my absolute best to pretend that nothing was wrong, I entered to see the tall, narrow-faced man sitting in the captain's chair briefly turn his head to watch me enter, then unconcernedly face away from me after a glance to look back at his workstation.

"How long until jump?" I asked Purser Wilkins, who normally wasn't on the bridge for this evolution but was apparently there to keep an eye on me while the bridge crew was busy working. Not that I didn't already know, because jumps were calculated well in advance whenever possible and for a routine commercial run like this the Beowulf would already have its navigation plot completed before it had even left the dock, but I had to say something. Since a starship couldn't enter jumpspace near any object substantially more massive than a dreadnaught - even a small asteroid or a large space station could do it - the Beowulf's relatively slow 1.5-G maneuver drive had taken us almost four hours to take us far away from Terra to put us beyond its jump limit.

"About ten minutes." she replied softly. "Nervous?"

"Well, there is the statistical one in a million and a half chance of a jumpdrive malfunction." I deliberately leaned into her misapprehension.

"Yeah, but that means people who have been working the spacelanes for a decade haven't even met anyone who's met anyone who actually made the Final Jump that way." she said. "Even a misjump scenario, as rare as they are, means you just come out somewhere else. Sometimes even somewhere farther away than it's possible for your jumpdrive to normally take you." She continued more thoughtfully. "Always wondered if someone would ever figure out how that happens so they can make a longer-range jumpdrive. Even the Vilani haven't gotten past Jump-2, and they've had stardrive for thousands of years."

"They've had Jump-2 for thousands of years." I replied. "If they haven't figured out a method for going further per jump than that in all that time... well, misjumps prove it's physically possible, but... huh, that is weird. Why haven't they?"

"Because the Imperium stopped fundamental research into jump physics when they originally got to Jump-2 and went 'Ehhh, good enough.' And they just stayed there ever since." she replied. "If you're curious as to exactly why then ask the Captain later. He grew up there."

"So, he's not from Nusku?" I asked. Because the thing that had shocked me so much when I'd stepped onto the bridge was that the skipper of the vessel taking me on my first interstellar voyage was, from his accent, features, and dusky coloration, the textbook archetype of a Vilani.

"Nope. Born somewhere about twenty parsecs in from the border." she said unconcernedly. "He was first mate on a ship like this one when the Navy captured it towards the end of the Procyon campaign in the last big one, and after the war was over and he was out of the internment camp he just didn't go home. Said that working for a Terran freight line was just like working for Sharurshid - that's the big Vilani shipping megacorp - except they paid better and micromanaged less. And it's not like he wasn't qualified on this model of ship!"

"There we go." I heard the Captain say. "Final course recheck complete and nominal. Astrogator?" he trailed off inquiringly.

"Looks good to me as well." the officer he addressed replied. "Lock it in?"

"Yes." the Captain replied. "All stations, report final readiness for jump."

"Cargo and passengers, all secure and accounted for." Purser Wilkins said formally.

"Engineering, green board." a voice came from the intercom.

"Life support, green board." another voice came in.

"Sensors and comms, green board." one of the crewmen at another panel replied.

"Astrogation, green board." the astrogator replied.

"All stations report green." the Captain acknowledged. "We are go for jump in two minutes seventeen seconds... mark." he finished, reaching forward to tap a control on his touchsteen and release the ship's computer to execute the jump program.

Everyone sat back and watched the big countdown timer on the central display as it ticked off the remaining seconds. At exactly one minute I practically leaped out of my skin when the lighting panels suddenly cut out and the dim emergency lighting flicked on.

I barely bit back a frantic yelp of 'What's wrong?' when my perfect memory reminded me from basic training that I was a passenger and passengers did not speak during an emergency situation on the bridge except to yell a warning or reply to a direct question. Which thought held me long enough to realize that nobody else on the bridge had so much as blinked, much less was showing any signs of alarm.

I was just about ready to blow a fuse at the 'practical joke' they'd just pulled when the Captain broke in on my thoughts. "Oh, the lights? On our early vessels they'd reduce all nonessential systems to minimum power shortly before jump, so as to allow the capacitors a maximum surge capacity for the jumpdrive. It's standard procedure to dim lights before jump on Imperial starships even to this day."

Since he'd spoken to me, ship's etiquette meant I could reply - assuming I did so courteously. So I changed my original 'That wouldn't work!' into the form of a question that a stupid greenie would ask. "How does changing the overall power load by a few dozen watts - it's just the lighting panels, after all - even begin to affect the sort of gigawatt-range capacitor surge that a jump drive requires?"

"It doesn't, not at all." the Captain agreed good-naturedly. "But it's still tradition!"

"Coming up on jump." the astrogator said.

Everybody - including me - turned to face the main display and held our breaths waiting for the big moment. Part of my mind noted that even the veteran spacers around me were not entirely jaded in the moment, let alone the young woman about to make her first leap into another dimension-

The astrogator spoke up again. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Aaand-"

Discontinuity.

* * * * *

At the moment the jumpdrive initiatied, the CSS Beowulf and every soul aboard on her ceased to exist for a moment so fleeting that not even the finest atomic clocks had ever perceived it, before Time's arrow resumed her flow for us. Only now our ship was no longer in the material universe, but held suspended in a temporary 'bubble' of normalspace that we had 'dragged' with us into the barely knowable and quite frankly weird other dimensions that comprised jumpspace. If by some cosmic horridness that bubble ever went away and exposed us to jumpspace directly... well, the theories were many and varied but the punchline was the same in all of them.

Fortunately, the collapse of a jumpspace 'bubble' - whether at the scheduled end of the jump or because your astrogator had critically goofed his calcs and plotted you a jumpspace route that crossed the no-jump zone around another astronomical body in between your departure and destination - had only one known result, to kick the ship back into normal space and leave it there. Although one of the many odd facts about jumpdrive is that regardless of how far you jumped - whether it was the full 2 parsecs and change of a jump-2 drive, or an in-system microjump from Terra to Mars orbit - all jumps took 168 Terran hours, or one Terran week, of time (plus or minus a margin of ten percent). So the instant we entered jumpspace a 168-hour "jump clock" timer started counting down, with our exact time of emergence being on a bell curve centered on 168 hours with the maximum divergence of 16+ hours being a literal one-in-a-million case. And even the most widely known divergences, even in the case of a misjump that entirely slagged your drive and left you further off your plotted route than it was normally possible for you to go, were still were consistent with the standard time variance if nothing else. Yes, this all sounded extremely arbitrary and oddly convenient, but the collective body of knowledge about the science of jump physics was built on a few experimentally verified facts, a whole lot of theoretical wild guesses, and an at least equally long list of things we were so in the dark about that we didn't even know what we didn't know.

And no, there hadn't been a 'The Actual Secrets of Jumpdrive Physics, Unabridged Edition' or equivalent anywhere on the perk lists the Forge had been offering me. I'd looked.

But the practical upshot of it was that the most relaxed period of time in a starship crew's life would begin. You had nothing to do in jumpspace except catch up on all the routine chores you were postponing while doing groundside or in-system operations. While you were in jump the rest of the universe couldn't get into annoy you in any way whatsoever, and your ship's systems were presumably more than up to the task of running a week without catastrophic malfunction because only a suicidal idiot didn't check for that before jumping in the first place. Also, even if our power plant spontaneously melted into slag then so long as we had enough battery power to run the life support for a week, we'd still get to our destination alive - the jumpdrive's job ended the instant you actually finished charging up for jump and entered jumpspace, from that point on you were basically operating on inertia. And a good thing too, because otherwise you'd be betting an entire starship and its crew's lives on 1 week of constant system uptime in all the various power and drive subsystems every time they went anywhere, as opposed to just needing that no-fault uptime during the actual run-up to the jump itself, with every opportunity to abort and go back to port if you didn't like what you were seeing.

Or so Captain Urshargii enjoyed explaining to me at length at breakfast the next morning, because as soon you got him going on the topic of Starship Operations 101 then he moved immediately into professor mode and didn't stop. Which... okay, I honestly didn't mind because while I knew a lot of this already from school, textbooks are one thing and talking to somebody who actually did it for a living was something else.

And, of course, I was taking full advantage of my first and perhaps only chance to speak with a real live citizen - or ex-citizen - of the Vilani Imperium. So even though he couldn't give me more than the history they'd taught him in school... well, heck. That's about all I could give any alien that came and asked me to talk about my homeland, and yet it would still be very useful to someone trying to learn about Terran culture from scratch.

Captain Urshargii, as the first officer of a Vilani merchant vessel, had technically been of the damgarii social class. If the Vilani Imperium had been a strictly feudal system then he'd have ranked as a knight - not a commoner, but not a noble either. The actual literal translation of damgarii was "manager", however, just as the literal translations of the commoner or engarii class was "employee" and the noble or enshii class was "executive". It was both a hereditary and a non-hereditary rank - Vilani children automatically started out at the lower social rank of their two parents (which was one reason why inter-class marriage was rare) and almost always stayed at that status for the rest of their life. You could lose status for ongoing and gross incompetence - even if your parents were two of the highest of the enshii that wouldn't stop a conspicuous moron of an offspring from eventually being quietly demoted and put off to pasture somewhere if they couldn't find a way to get him up to where he could be trusted with responsibility - and likewise you could raise status for merit, although in both cases it took a lot of fuckups or a lot of merit to eventualy line jump. And, of course, regular chains of command like any other military, government, or commercial concern existed in the Imperium just like they did here - the social class thing was more of a broad cultural sorting mechanism on top of all that.

Captain Urshargii had actually been born an engarii and had worked his way up from starship crewman to starship officer over decades, eventually being given damgarii status when he came that close to sitting in the captain's chair. He'd been without close family ties, though - a somewhat unusual thing for a Vilani, I gathered, who apparently tended to gather in extended families and clans for support - so making the decision to stay in Terran space after the Third Interstellar War and continue on in the same career he loved doing for a boss that he felt more comfortable with was a rational decision.

Well, either that or he was a spy. But I had to hope that the Office of Naval Intelligence had at least tried to check out that possibility, or else he'd never have gotten authorized for Terran citizenship. And he was a naturalized citizen, not a resident alien - he'd forfeited his Imperial citizenship and couldn't go home again. No, I certainly didn't try to ask why.

And he certainly hadn't conformed to the stereotype of the sneering, arrogant, supercilious Vilani from the holovids. Well, except in his looks. My clumsy attempt to bring that up only drew a laugh from him, and a confirmation that he actually had known a few people like that among his enshii superiors, although most of them could at least manage a more diplomatic form of considering oneself to be on an entirely different social plane of existence than the common folk they were speaking to.

I admittedly had more to do on the voyage over than just loaf around and trade life stories with the crew. There was a whole file full of training videos and self-quizzes I was supposed to have already finished by the time I made planetfall - I guess they figured that using the week in jumpspace to at least begin to save time on my orientation - but with my new memory I could cram through all stuff pretty fast and still get it all down letter-perfect. So I still had time to draw out my first living source on Vilani culture and society, poke around the ship as much as the crew would indulge my curiosity without getting annoyed, and begin my very first petty social engineering effort towards establishing myself as a breakout prodigy.

Although I'd considered spending some of the 200cp I'd banked so far on something to help me do this, I honestly hadn't seen anything on the list that was directly applicable. Plus, I still hadn't arrived at Peraspera yet and I had no clue how soon I'd get any more CP, so I decided to just make do with what I had.

As a clever social manipulator I was... really not... but the sensor tech of the Beowulf, a Mr. Clarke, was a young man barely off his own initial Public Service tour as a Navy enlisted man. And I was pretty sure that the reason he'd gotten out after his initial four years instead of going career - after all, he was still working in the same job on a starship, and the Navy was far more prestigious than crewing a tramp freighter - is because he either hadn't quite made the grade, or didn't like the work. Not that he was lazy, per se - Captain Urshargii ran a taut ship and didn't tolerate deadweight - but he clearly was not someone with great ambitions.

So when I originally started talking to him with 'Hey, you had the same job my dad did!', and then after a few rounds of back-and-forth I'd mildly bragged about how dad had talked about his job so much that I was pretty sure I could do it myself, he pointed me right at his console and booted up a training sim and told me to put my solarii where my mouth was. I'd probably have tried for a less confrontational way to get him to do this - asked him politely if I could try the console in training mode or something - but some people just rubbed you the wrong way, and he was one of them.

So, I did indeed put my solarii where my mouth was. And then I did the same to next several sims he tried. By this point First Officer Molteno had noticed what was going on, and came over to see me doing quite well on a discrimination-and-tracking exercise pulled from a real-life case study of a Vilani commerce raider versus a 400-dton armed merchant cruiser shortly before the Third Interstellar War.

"Your father couldn't have taken his own training sims home with him when he mustered out." he said. "The Navy sims are restricted material. Did you get a download from the merchant marine academy or something?"

"Something like that." I non-committed. "And, well, I just found it really fascinating." I did my best aw-shucks grin as I continued. "I find a lot of stuff really fascinating. Then again, I've got total recall so..."

"Ah, that explains it." he nodded, as Mr. Clarke grew even grumpier with envy. I actually sympathized with him there - as someone who'd spent years cramming for exams myself, the existence of those lucky people who could just look at the book once and go on to ace any brute-force memorization exercise was annoying. And thanks to the Forge I could now speak from both ends of that equation. "You could probably take the sensor tech certification exam if you tried."

"Well, it's not as if I'm doing my Public Service onboard a starship or anything..." I demurred. Come on, bite the hook, bite the hook...

"To be honest, I'm curious to see how you'd do." Mr. Molteno said. "Want to try it?"

"Heck yeah!" I agreed cheerfully.

So, I sat down at one of the unused bridge terminals as Mr. Molteno set me up with an official Confederation Merchant Marine certification exam for sensor technicians, and I spent the next two hours proving that I could indeed have passed the test if I'd taken it officially. And at dinner that evening I waited until Mr. Molteno had finished entertaining everyone with the tale of the new kid and her unofficially following in her father's footsteps, and I politely asked Captain Urshargii if I could have a copy of the relevant log entries so I could mail them to my father. And he of course agreed... and went further than that, due to a quirk of Vilani culture that I'd known about from something he'd told me several days ago and had shamelessly plotted to take advantage of.

Notably, that for all that they were extremely traditionalist and class-conscious in many ways, in many other ways Vilani society was more relentlessly meritocratic than most Terran cultures had ever dreamed of being. To a Vilani, if you'd proven that you were able to do the job then you'd proven that you were able to do the job, period, end of sentence. It didn't matter what your seniority was or how you'd come by to learn it, the only thing that mattered was if you performed satisfactorily both on the standardized tests of ability and in the field.

So, having been assured that I'd shown a suitable grade both in simulation and on the academics, Captain Urshargii - just as I'd expected him to do - readily signed off on legitimately certifying me as having passed the relevant examinations under the supervision of his officers, and signing off on an official notation to the Public Service Bureau - my current employers - that I had done so.

Which of course didn't mean that I was really a starship sensor technician yet... but it did mean that I was now legally eligible to apply, on a no-experience training-only entry-level basis, to any civilian starship as a crew member in that job slot. But of course I had no ambitions to run off and join the Free Traders or anything like that. My real goal was to arrive at my first Public Safety job as somehow standing out, even just a little, from the common run of employee. To present myself as someone who later on could be believed as some kind of uniquely brilliant polymath. Which I'd just made a good start at accomplishing.

Achievement Unlocked: On The Radar
(Make An Initial Impression As Unusually Precocious)
(Bonus: Have Your Achievement Acknowledged On Your Official Permanent Record)
Reward: 200 CP

And it had all relied upon taking advantage of the professional jealousy and territorial nature of a fellow Terran, and the uncompromising professional integrity and attention to details of a Vilani. Which... was leaving me feeling just a little unfocused, given how all my life I'd grown up in an uncompromising atmosphere of how the Vilani were the enemy, who would destroy us if they could.

But never from your father, who'd actually fought them in space, or your mother, whose only son died from Vilani nukes, my conscience prodded me irresistibly.

My Forge-granted library-in-my-head included at least some textbooks on the theory and practice of propaganda just as it did on a wide range of other topics, so I was already academically aware that the first step in indoctrinating soldiers to fire on the enemy without hesitation - a thing normal human minds actually didn't do very well - was to dehumanize the enemy in their eyes. It was a lot easier to strike with lethal force if the target had no face, if it was just an object or a threat and not another person. And yes, I was aware that the Confederation's survival strategy was and had been ever since our first one-world government had formed out of the ashes of the First Interstellar War based on a total mobilization - and in the event of war, near-total militarization - of the Confederation's efforts. That was why we had most of a war economy even in peacetime, why the most rapidly-expanding categories in the labor market were colonial development, space industry, and starship construction, and why Public Service - also created shortly after the First Interstellar War - existed to drill at least the beginnings of military-style thinking and work habits into as many impressionable young minds as possible. Plus, of course, all of the work that primary and secondary education, as well as popular entertainment, did to cast the Vilani as a fearsome, implacable monolith.

But now I'd met one, talked with one, and ate dinner with one for a week, and between that and my Forge-granted inability to make myself forget anything I really needed to remember, that childhood indoctrination of mine no longer looked remotely as simple or clear as it once had.

And yet I was still an only child. And I'd still accompanied my father through the nuclear-ashed ruins of the city our family had lived in for centuries. And the Vilani saarpuhii kushuggi who'd ordered that bombing, along with the officers and crews of his fleet that had executed it, had done so without a moment's hesitation. And all in accordance with official - and openly acknowledged! - Vilani doctrine that in time of war the enemy must be not only defeated but smashed. That the concept of 'collateral damage' or 'noncombatants' did not really exist, and that the only logical way to wage war was that once you had broken through the enemy's defenses to do as much damage as you possibly could to either force their unconditional surrender or leave them so broken that they would be unable to ever defy you again.

I tried to reconcile the fact that kindly, honest hardworking people like Captain Urshargii existed with the equally solid fact that if Vilani internal politics we hadn't had any idea existed at the time hadn't forced Kadur Erasharshi to abandon his campaign against Earth before he could push it through to completion, he might very well have burned all of Terra from pole to pole unless we'd agreed to dissolve the Confederation and become the next Vilani subject race forever. And it... just... wouldn't...

As the featureless grey of jumpspace faded from the viewscreens and we broke back out into realspace, I sighed and abandoned my fruitless ruminating to start cleaning up my cabin and packing my stuff back up in my carryall. In a few hours I'd leave the Beowulf behind and meet the people I'd be spending the next two years of my life with, on a new planet, and I'd almost certainly be working hard enough to not have any time for pondering.

But I definitely had a lot to write about to Mom and Dad in my next letter to them. Because if I'd ever had any delusions that this saving the Confederation stuff was going to be as cut-and-dried as the holovids made it out to be, then I certainly didn't have them now.

* * * * *

Author's Note: I have a lot of setting knowledge and background to get on-stage. Fortunately, one of the benefits of having your MC be a teenager just leaving the nest is that they don't know shit, and the process of maturing means that they will spend a lot of camera time finding out about shit. Which means so will the audience.

And even better, since it's all in-character voice and not third-person omniscient, I can tweak it later if it turns out I need to. After all, perception is a thing.

PS: No, this is not the same Beowulf that every old-school Traveller fan knows of legend. That ship, after all, only existed in the Third Imperium era centuries and centuries from now. But it is a very old class of merchantship, and a very old name, and names do get reused throughout history... and sometimes, you just have to pay due homage to where it all began.

Unspent CP: 400
Purchases: None

cliffc999 · Nov 16, 2022

"If you're such a genius, then what are you doing here?" my tormentor sneered at me scornfully.

"Double service credit and an interest in the research being done here." I replied tonelessly. I was doing my best to keep from sounding confrontational instead of properly de-escalating, but I was too frustrated to succeed much. Less than a day off the ship and I was already back in primary-ed. Oh, come on! Weren't we supposed to be adults by now?!?

The brainstorm I'd had on the trip out of getting officially qualified in a shipboard watch-standing position, at least on the entry level, had done exactly what I'd hoped it would do. Instead of being dumped into the general labor pool with all of the other Public Service kids sweating out their tours here, I'd been yoinked as an assistant by the first Peraspera Terraforming Project scientist who'd actually heard about my achievement. So far, the idea of going to a place where my chain of command would be more eager to get a surprise in their PopSnax box than disgruntled at how their latest square peg wasn't going to fit in any of their neat round holes was working out just fine.

What I hadn't anticipated - although I should have - was the reaction I'd get from my peers. Because in hindsight it was entirely obvious that the Public Service kids without any special aptitude - in other words, most of them - would be used for grunt labor and cleanup. And whenever you had a unit of draftees assigned to such duties, they rapidly worked out their own internal and informal seniority system for who caught the shittier parts of the shit detail and how often. And as was the eternal way of things in all organizations, the new guy was the one who got stuck with all the worst ones, and there she'd stay until someone else came along to be new girl and relieve them of that position.

Unless, of course, some strange little nerd came along out of nowhere and completely line-jumped the entire system. And got herself fast-tracked right into one of the best possible assignments a Public Service kid could get practically as soon as she got off the shuttle. And then still got assigned to the same living quarters as the rest of the PS detachment because she was still a brand-new PS person, after all, and that's where you put them.

So sure enough, as soon we got back to our quarters from dinner on my first day downside the unlucky gentleman who'd been desperately waiting for his chance to get off permanent toilet-cleaning duty and hand me the mop instead decided to box me into a corner along with a couple of his friends and verbally express his displeasure. And while he probably hadn't meant to take it quite this far - if he'd been intending mayhem from the outset it would have made more sense for him to wait until after lights-out and catch me somewhere more private - tempers were really starting to spiral out of control.

"I don't know what you want me to say." I finally replied, for lack of a better idea than just trying to tell the truth and hope it actually worked for once. "I didn't pull any strings to get here."

"Bullshit you didn't!" David, the allegedly aggrieved party, burst out angrily and then punctuated it with a hard shove that sent me staggering back a step into the wall.

"Um, are you sure we should...?" one of his cronies broke in tentatively, as they began to pick up that this situation was starting to rapidly edge off course.

"Shut up!" he yelled back, as his face reddened and warmed up to a full rant. "This rich little suck-up thinks she's so special because she's got connections for a plush assignment-"

That dry little voice that lives in the backs of all our heads sarcastically noted that he'd already contradicted himself in the space of two sentences, given that anyone who could arrange for a 'plush assignment' wouldn't be on this planet at all.

"- and if we don't make it plain what the pecking order around here really is straight off, teacher's pet will be lording it all over us forever!" he finished.

"You saw my datapad." I said, because he certainly had seen it when he'd yanked it out of my hands to toss it onto the couch before backing me into a corner. "Was that the model a 'rich, well-connected' girl would be using?"

"Shut up!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, as he visibly did his best to drown out that little voice in his own head that was telling him he was being an idiot. "One more word, just one more word-!"

"Please stop before it's too late." I replied with quiet determination, and then braced myself for what I knew would come next. This was always the hardest part, keeping it civil even when you most wanted to scream obscenities. But it was important, because-

Sure enough, my being years older and allegedly wiser since the last time didn't change the fact that pain still hurt.

And so that's how my introduction to my Public Service peers on Peraspera went about as badly as was humanly possible. Because of course it was my fault that one of their unit mates got himself arrested on felony assault charges the very first day. It surely wasn't because a large, athletic young man was stupid enough to beat on a girl almost half a meter shorter than he was and who barely weighed 50 kilograms soaking wet, especially when she not only hadn't lifted a finger against him but hadn't used so much as used harsh language. But hey, at least he'd be getting his wish to go back to Terra right away. Even if he'd be doing it in confinement onboard the next supply ship and facing several years' worth of prison sentence for aggravated assault.

About the third time I'd come home from primary-ed with bumps and bruises Mom had joked that I was the history of Poland in miniature - too small to avoid being trampled flat by invaders again and again, but still willing to stand up and fight again and again. One of the only unfavorable notations on my educational/development transcripts was that I had poor interpersonal skills, especially at de-escalation and conflict resolution. Which was a fancy way of saying that where the normal kid would have the common sense to back down from bullies, I just couldn't make myself do it. But once I'd figured out that the best way to avoid he-said-she-said was to make sure the physical evidence showed that the conflict was entirely one-sided - IOW, to make sure I was the only person in the fight showing any marks - the bullies eventually stopped, because they knew that it would end up in the principal's office again and people would end up getting suspended again. That it didn't matter how much bigger they were or how outnumbered you were, they'd still eventually stop pushing it if you could survive long enough to prove that it wasn't worth it.

Fortunately, the average bully didn't know a damn thing about how to hit where it really hurt someone - except for that one time when I was twelve, but his own friends had pulled him off of me after he'd started to put the boots in while I was down - so, I spent the night at the clinic for observation (and also so that they'd have time to scrounge me a room of my own somewhere, now that putting me in the Public Service quarters had failed so disastrously), got some painkillers for my bruises, and went off to my first day at work.

Achievement Unlocked - I WILL SHOW THEM ALL!
(Boost Your IQ Above 200)
Reward: 100 CP

Which is why I'd spent the 400cp I'd accumulated all on one perk, Genius Intellect (SyFy Combined Continuity), because if I was going to start creating a personal narrative around myself as some kind of once-in-a-lifetime genius then I'd need to actually be a genius. Merely memorizing and cross-indexing things could only take you so far, and I would soon enough need to go far, far beyond that. And this was the best - heck, about the only - 'boost your whole IQ' option available on the Forge's purchase menu right now, especially given how I'd noted on the voyage out that items would expire from or appear on the list at irregular intervals. So even if you saw something you weren't entirely sure would be immediately useful you still faced the question of 'Should I grab this now anyway, or risk having to do without it later? But wait, what if I run myself out of points now and something ideal comes along later?'

No, I didn't need my shiny new genius perk to figure out that between the limited window of choices and the random(?) time variable, the Forge was doing its level best to make proper opportunity-cost analysis impossible by denying me the ability to judge or even know the full range of possibilities. So the ongoing internal debate between the 'Lab Rat' and 'Pawn In A Game Of Gods' continued its eternal stalemate.

"Are you all right?" was the inevitable first question out of Dr. Ward's mouth as soon as I showed up to work. Dr. Antonin Ward, PhD, formerly chairman of the mathematics department at St. Petersburg University, was the chief data analyst for the terraforming project. He'd also been lucky enough to be the first to hear about their incoming PS volunteer's achievement and get his request for a new lab assistant through the system before anybody else could.

"Yes sir." I said. "It's just bruises. I've gotten worse falling out of- well." I did my best aw-shucks shrug. Fortunately that one seemed to work just fine on authority figures even if I'd never had the knack of communicating well with people my age-

"Well, there will certainly be none of such treatment here." he declared firmly. "So, I understand you have an unusually vigorous amount of self-education. Tell me about it. Do you have any experience with statistical mathematics?"

"College level." I said truthfully but incompletely, because the free download of knowledge that had come with Well-Researched included enough on mathematics to have a PhD of my own in the subject, and that on top of my new Genius Intellect boosting me to where I could do calculus in my head. But I certainly didn't want to come across bragging like I was the reincarnation of Carl Freidrich Gauss on the very first day.

"Perfect!" he agreed. "Now I can offload much of the routine dataset work on you."

"What else are assistants for?" I did my best to lean into the joke.

"Then we understand each other!" he replied amusedly, and the interview process went from there. And after a round of ad hoc oral exams interspersed in-between following him through his normal workday and fetching and carrying, by the end of the day I was officially assigned and accepted as Dr. Ward's new aide.

Less than a week into my new job I spent my 100 remaining CP on a Programming (World Seed) perk, because Dr. Ward needed someone who could translate his wishes into a format the machine could actually understand and vice versa. It's not that he was computer illiterate, exactly, but more that the standard mathematics software wasn't very intuitive or useful for the particular statistical constructs that he wanted to set up for all the vast amounts of terraforming data our satellite network and probe teams were bringing in. Especially given that the Project team was designing some of them as they went along. So while my genius and memory perks already meant that I could rapidly become one of the most skilled operators of our mainframe on the team, I chose to invest a little extra in making me a whiz at writing code to do pretty much anything within the capabilities of the machine. Because the only way we were going to get software perfectly suited to the Project's particular needs was if we coded the damn utilities ourself, and "hey! somebody's an unrecorded computer genius!" is one of the most archetypical talents a brilliant kid could bring out of her basement. And my comp-sci grades from secondary-ed, as prosaic as the course material had been there, would still support that kind of narrative as well.

And given how thoroughly intertwined computers and computer programs were with most forms of modern technology nowadays, a chance to get really good at working with and programming them was worth grabbing as soon as it became available. It would have all sorts of uses later, I was sure. Even hacking ability, if that perk description actually lived up to the promise hinted at in its text. Not that I was going to make any experiments along those lines right away - getting a criminal record of any kind would ruin any chance I might have at doing several important things later, and it just wasn't worth the risk at this time.

And speaking of criminal records, one of the things I had on my plate in my first week there was the trial of my assailant. Like all colony worlds without large enough populations to qualify for home rule and General Assembly representation it was under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Bureau, and that meant it also had a Colonial Constabulary detachment and a duly sworn-in Confederation judge. Even an asteroid mining settlement with a population of only a few hundred was still required to have a minimum of one constable in residence, because the abuses of 'corporate settlements' - privatized space habitats with only corporate security to be police, prosecutor, and prison all in one - in the pre-Confederation era had definitely left some lessons of history to learn from. But, the practical upshot was that our little planet-town was still large enough to have a justice system, and so David had had his fair trial - or would have had one if he hadn't seen the writing on the wall - and the jury's reaction - right after I'd finished testifying and had his advocate approach the judge to say that his client would like to plead guilty in return for less than the maximum sentence.

"Are you happy now?" one of the people who'd been standing around the break room watching that night confronted me angrily about an hour after the trial was over.

"About what, Claire?" I asked her brusquely, seeing her start mildly in surprise at my addressing her by name despite it having been said only once in my hearing and even that little an offhand mention in passing on the only occasion we'd ever met before. "About getting beaten up by someone almost twice my size? No, that actually isn't my idea of a good time."

"About helping ruin someone's life!" she yelled at me. "Sure, he could be a jerk sometimes but does he really deserve to go to prison for a year? And then spend the rest of his life with a 'convicted felon' tag on him that never comes off?"

"Was that a rhetorical question?" I threw back, pointing an emphatic finger at my face.

"Listen, miss supergenius, have you ever heard of a concept called 'forgiveness'?" she yelled back, red-faced.

"You mean-" I bit off the sarcastic remark I'd originally intended before it finished leaving my mouth and took a deep breath, because I really didn't need to have two confrontations spiral out of control on me in my first week. "Why in- why would you even think it was appropriate in this case?" I asked.

"He was under a lot of stress, okay?" she said, and fortunately for both of us continued before I could say the first thing that kind of excuse brought to mind. "He should never have been assigned to a sealed habitat like in the first place!"

"I'll grant that I'm about the only PS draftee weird enough to actually ask to come here, but not liking the selection system doesn't equal being having been unfairly singled out by it." I said as diplomatically as I could.

"That's not what I meant. He- he had claustrophobia." she said softly, looking around.

"He'd never have been assigned here if he had." I immediately replied.

"Well he hadn't told anyone about it." she continued, and I barely resisted facepalming. "He'd- he'd wanted to get into the Navy, but admitting to that would have meant he couldn't have gotten in the military at all-"

"Even the Army requires everyone to be vacc suit qualified, let alone the Navy, because they still potentially do planetary assault landings or get posted on worlds without breathable atmosphere." I agreed. "If even mild claustrophobia was on his medical record he'd never have gotten off of Terra. But he didn't come forward to the medics with it even after his Draft selection didn't select him for the military because...?"

"And admit that he'd lied on his intake medical?" she said incredulously. "That would have gotten him in trouble!"

"And deliberately concealing a medical condition that would materially affect what duties he could be safely assigned to didn't get him in trouble?" I replied with a meaningful wave back towards the colony's main (and only) courtroom that I'd recently left. "Okay, with the new data you gave me I can see in hindsight how he was basically a piece of unexploded ordnance waiting for any transient impulse to detonate it, but that still doesn't make this my fault."

"No, but you were so busy being all 'I'm too special to talk to you peons' all last week that none of us could get a moment to tell you this." she shot back. "You wouldn't even answer an email! You wouldn't even give a moments' consideration that there might have been a reason someone did something to you other than 'Oh, they attacked me so they have to be Evil McEvilFace to the core'?"

"Wait, you wanted me to be the one to bring this up in court as a mitigating factor?" I asked incredulously. "Why have him confess how he helped get himself into this? Or have the people who actually knew him beforehand be the one to bring this tip to the authorities?"

"Like they'd have taken his word for it? Or his friends' words for it?" she shot back.

"Does that mean you can't see the logical contradiction between assuming that as given and expecting me to take your word for it, or that you'd already tried to tell someone and gotten shot down?"

"... that second one." she admitted grudgingly.

"If they wouldn't believe what you told them, then they certainly wouldn't believe me telling them what you'd told me. Because even if I had agreed to pass on your message, I'd certainly have had to explain where I got this from. It's not as if I'd ever so much as heard of him before the incident, let alone knew him."

"Maybe it wouldn't have done any good." Claire conceded reluctantly. "But the point is that you didn't even want to try."

"I didn't even know anything existed to try." I pointed out. "And before you go 'That's my fault!', try to remember that I was settling into a completely new place, with a whole ton of extra work that I'd made for myself by getting into the job that I'd had, and just might have had a reason to not want to hang out and make friends with all the same people who'd stood around and-"

"We didn't know he was going to beat you up!" she insisted.

"I'll accept that even he probably didn't know he was going to beat me up before that conversation started," I conceded in turn, "because the way he spiral'ed so suddenly went past 'impulse crime' and at least halfway to 'psychotic break'. Which is actually one of the main reasons I believe what you just said, by the way. But that doesn't change the fact that you did know that a very large and muscular young man was going to trap a very small young woman in a corner, with several of you to help surround said young woman and prevent any chance of her slipping away, while he intimidated and harassed her in God only knows what kind of fashion. Is there anything in that description of events you want to say isn't true?" I finished angrily, glaring upward at her.

After a few moments' of the silent treatment in return, I continued. "To sum up, I had every reason not to like any of you - except the one person there who actually told the whole truth to the Constabulary when they showed up without having to have it yanked out of him - and why didn't you send him to try and talk to me, anyway?"

"He wouldn't come." she admitted.

"I guess him and David weren't friends, then." I nodded. "As to why I never answered your emails, its because subject headers like 'ABOUT DAVID' and 'ANSWER ME DAMN IT!', coming from somebody you only met once and on the other end of a violent confrontation at the time, look so much like harassment that it's an open-and-shut case of 'Delete before reading'."

"You still should have looked." she insisted mulishly. "And because you didn't, his life is over."

"No, because he made bad choices and his friends helped him make them instead of helping him not make them, his life has had a serious setback." I corrected her firmly. "I had nothing to do with it except for the part where I vigorously bruised up his knuckles with my face. And I am not going to budge on that one, so don't even try. But-" I forced myself to continue saying. "If the authorities don't legitimately have all the relevant facts of the situation - or at least the chance to decide whether they are relevant or not for themselves - then they should. So I'll give you this much. You and I can both go to the Constabulary office right now and ask them to enter what you just said into his case file for review on Terra." I thought for a moment. "Along with a suggestion that he be given a retest on his psych eval. And my own honest sentiment that in hindsight, his behavior seemed more erratic than simple criminal intent could explain. And then... whatever happens, happens."

"If that's the best you can do." she accepted grudgingly, and we trooped off to do just that.

I swear, even if I lived to be a billion years old and grew a brain the size of a planet I would still never understand how some people think. Or how they can so epically fail to think.

* * * * *

So, except for the David incident and its particular fallout, the first several months I spent on Peraspera were actually really satisfying. Sure, I was basically a pariah with my junior peer group and stuck in an isolated pressure habitat on a toxic-atmo world parsecs away from home, but there was so much interesting stuff to do! I of course did my share of fetching coffee and running errands and such for Dr. Ward, but there were a lot of routine scientific duties that were things he'd rather offload on someone else but weren't quite important enough to hand to one of his fellow professors, and now he didn't have to do them himself. After all, the biggest component of the terraforming project was monitoring what was already going on, so there were a whooooooooole lot of atmospheric and geological readings being taken on a continual basis that needed a whole lot of preliminary sorting and correlating done before you could even shove it into the mainframe and see what happened.

Due to being a dedicated research outpost our small town of 13,142 (as of last week) still had as many scientists and technicians as a tech university, and that meant they'd outfitted it with a university-sized library to match. Computer scientists estimated that at the dawn of the 21st century the total amount of data stored on the entire planetary net had been roughly 1 exabyte - 1 million terabytes - in size, and given that modern data-storage technology could put a terabyte on a datachip no larger than a deci-sol coin then you could literally mail the entire original Internet between planets in a small crate. So equipping even the remotest outpost with a library rivaling MIT's was well within the Colonial Bureau's budget, especially given that the 1-week travel lag between her and Earth meant that it was simpler to just load up the whole thing with all the books, raw archived research data from relevant projects both contemporary and historical, and other such resources - non-classified, of course - that might possibly be useful instead of leaving the Project team sucking their thumbs for over half a month waiting for someone on Terra to get back to them with a needed reference cite. Because the only method of interstellar communication was messages carried by starship, with all that implied.

And the professors at this 'university' were even more relaxed than an actual university at allowing even a junior not-yet-an-undergraduate Public Service assistant to go rooting through the whole thing basically at will, duties permitting. Especially given that I rapidly became Dr. Ward's prosthesis for all things to do with the computer network, because between his administrative duties and his own regular dives into the deepest realms of higher mathematics it was a lot more convenient to use my talents at the keyboard than his own. Yes, an actual keyboard, how quaint. Voice input was great for routine tasks but when it came to rapidly inputting large amounts of data then trained fingers still beat out tongues by a country kilometer. Fortunately, my nerd habits had already made me a good typist and Programmer had made me an exceptional one.

So my first few months at Peraspera were actually fun, in a way I hadn't expected. Of course I hadn't been able to imagine how exhilarating it would be to have a supergenius brain until I actually got one, but it was a legitimate pleasure to just sit down and do several hours of concentrated intellectual exercise. I was getting to understand why most if not all the Project scientists had also volunteered to come here. What would sound like unimaginable drudgery to someone else - after all, the study of planetary formation meant you were looking at a process that would literally take a billion years to complete on its own, so it wasn't exactly the most fast-paced spectator sport out there - was what legitimately got them up in the morning. Human brains really were quirky things sometimes, and the further up the intelligence curve you went the quirkier they got.

And the practical upshot of the above is that unlike the rest of the Public Service labor draft here, who just wanted to sweat out their two years taking care of the routine drudgery and then getting back home and never leaving atmosphere again, I was surrounded by people who didn't care about my age or gender or lack of degrees or anything else so long as I was contributing to the ongoing intellectual effort that was our collective lives. It was everything I'd hoped for when me and my parents had originally come up with this idea and more.

Granted, the theory of planetary formation as well as the several experimental pilot projects the field teams were running regarding possible methods of tweaking it were not exactly going to win the next war for us, but I wasn't going to be having the same kind of experience with any military R&D teams until I had a top-secret security clearance, which wouldn't begin to happen until I could officially apply for such a position, which would require at least one college degree I didn't have yet. Hence the other reason I'd taken this position - to use the double-service credit of a hardship posting to get through my Public Service and back into school as quickly as I possibly could. After all, it's not as if trying to dodge the draft would have produced anything except a swift and painful end to any career aspirations except those open to ex-convicts - and that only after finishing my sentence.

However, the rate I was proving I could assimilate - and even more importantly, genuinely understand and usefully apply - knowledge of almost any sort prompted Dr. Ward to point out something that I hadn't even known about. Specifically, the part where Colonial Bureau regs contained provisions for allowing higher education to continue even in isolated outposts that weren't able to support universities. While the typical solution was of course to just get on a starship and head back to Terra or one of the larger colonies to go to school there, if certain exigencies prohibited freedom of travel and if someone was available who was already an accredited instructor at the university level, then that person could privately tutor students who could then, presuming their tutor gave them a favorable recommendation, take examinations on university admission to be given course credit for the work they'd already completed.

Or in other words, if I let Dr. Ward and several of his other colleagues here sign-off on my self-study, I could finish much of my college work here and only have to actually attend classes for things that they wouldn't let you test out of at all, such as certain laboratory subjects or 400-series coursework. In theory a frontier student could cut down the amount of time they'd have to leave home and attend a real university back on Terra down to one or two years, although the absolute minimum time of one year would require them to really really push it. Or to have spent more than time doing the remote study than would have been required for equivalent years' of college, assuming their settlement even had a suitably accredited instructor.

Or if they were someone with an IQ that went higher than the conventional tests could even measure - after all, 200 might or might not be the maximum physically possible for the human brain but it certainly was the point at which statistical psychologists threw up their hands and quit even trying to quantify things - and a superhumanly perfect memory,which meant she could complete all this coursework before her two years on Peraspera were over and her full normal workday in addition, and still not go crazy from overwork.

Damn. If this is the kind of thing that the Forge could do for someone just starting out with it, then where would it end?

Although I'd essentially given up on interacting with the other Public Service kids here after that disastrous first encounter, I was hardly lonely. A couple of the Project people doing tours here were married and working away from their spouse and kids for a year, so they had spare parental energy left over to slop onto me. Most of the rest were of the philosophy that a brilliant young mind was a tragic thing to waste and that it was their intellectual duty to help nourish it if they had a moment free to do so. There were a few curmudgeons, there always are in any population, but I was entirely willing to let them curmudgeon in peace and vice versa. Lord knows that I could understand how there were days where you just didn't want to put down the datapad and actually have to talk to people...

But very few of the Project scientists had come here for the money and this certainly wasn't a place you came to for the ambience or the glory, so that just left the ones who'd come because they had a sincere passion for the science being done here. And that sort of mind liked nothing better than to work with other intellectually curious minds, no matter what package that mind came in. Even some of the people who were here largely for the money still thought that way.

"Damn, Zofia. I still can't quite believe just how natural that is for you." the very large and muscular middle-aged man leaning over my shoulder as I worked at one of the master dataterminals in the central computer room complimented me. Andrzej Stepczinski was no professor but he'd spent his entire professional life working with advanced infosystems and networking technologies, and he was the seniormost datasystems technician for the entire settlement. A retired thirty-year veteran of the Confederation Army, he'd already been in the service for several years before my father had even enlisted, and unlike Dad he'd only gotten out last year. He'd then come straight here as a private contractor with the Colonial Bureau for a very generous premium to help him build up more capital to start his own small business with after he got back to Terra, and he ruled his own little fiefdom within the maintenance and support structure of the colony with an iron fist.

And as soon as my own datasystems support duties for Dr. Ward had brought me into contact with him, our shared national origin - as it happened we were the only two ethnic Poles on Peraspera - and my obvious talent for programming and analysis had motivated him to use every bureaucratic trick he knew towards the goal of maneuvering me into his orbit. As is, I was still officially assigned to the data-analysis department of the Project instead of to the datasystems support side of settlement maintenance, but I was up to unofficially time-sharing in his shop for almost a third of my work week - to 'better facilitate integration and computational support for the Project's needs, of course'. Besides, it did legitimately help when there was someone who could translate between the scientists who were programming their own dedicated analysis utilities and networks and the colony technicians who had to figure out a way to make it work and play well with the datasystems backbone that helped keep all the machines around here running.

Which is how I'd come to spend my morning using my Forge-granted Programming talent to bash together a compatibility suite for a particularly tricky requirement that the molecular biology department had regarding multi-dimensional protein-folding modeling that it had taken us two days to figure out why it kept crashing every time on a system that in theory should have had no problem running it - turns out there was a fatal bug in the math co-processor firmware that only cropped up if you were trying some very particular edge cases in 3-D modeling calcs - and then figuring out an alternative to putting that whole branch of the Project on hold for several weeks to send our write-up of the problem back to the manufacturer on Terra via ship-mail and have them get our hotfix back out to us the same way.

Which we'd still done, of course, on the contingency that we wouldn't be able to just figure out a way to code the damn patch ourselves... but that's the job I'd just been able to finish, with my natural genius and supernatural programming ability combining with Mr. Stepczinski's 30+ years of practical field knowledge in building, configuring, operating, and expedient-field-repairing all sorts of computers, computer networks, and peripherals ranging from the Army's most advanced battlefield tactical networking hardware to routine administrative datanets.

"Well... when it clicks, it clicks." I demurred as modestly as I could.

"It very seldom 'clicks' on that level for anyone." he replied. "When you originally had the idea of just trying to code the hotfix ourselves from first principles - even if your chain of command had signed off on it - I'd thought you were being just a tad overly ambitious. The main reason I went along with it is because my work schedule was largely clear this weekend otherwise, so why not. But you not only pulled it off, you made it look easy."

"Hey, you contributed at least as much as I did!" I replied.

"In the sense that I knew a lot of things you didn't know about microcode and the actual guts of advanced microcircuit design, yes." he agreed. "But I'd need specialized coursework to be able to code hardware-layer drivers like that - it's not quite my field - but I just saw you teach yourself that kind of specialized programming from what I was able to show you and the undergraduate comp-sci texts in barely a weekend. If you've got that kind of brains, why are you here instead of in officer training?"

"Public Service offers that to people straight out of secondary-ed?" I asked, honestly confused. "I didn't even see that kind of option on the list."

"Then somewhere out there in the PSB bureaucracy is a person who very much dropped the ball in your case." he said firmly, settling down into a chair next to me as I turned away from the terminal to face him. "Okay, the Armed Forces get their officers from three places. You've got your ROTC graduates who did it in college after their first four years in the Draft, you've got your 'mustangs' who were selected for OCS - or in my case, warrant officer training - after getting enough college credit on our own during our enlisted careers and showing suitable aptitude and attitude, and lastly you've got the ring-knockers - the Military or Naval Academy fast-trackers. Who are split between junior enlisted who stood out far enough from the crowd that they were offered an Academy slot instead of the military waiting until after "the needs of the service" meant it was time for another round of OCS selectees to fill the gaps, and young people who aced the CATs like you and get tossed straight into the Academy instead of making you spend four years on a service tour first. Between your National Honors and the part where you just absolutely destroy any intellectual challenge you're faced with and make it look easy, Recruiting Command should have had someone personally showing up at your house begging you to sign up. Do you have a disqualifying physical condition or something?"

"Healthy as a horse." I shrugged. "But yeah, nothing like that happened. I did get a really flattering list of choices from Public Service, and my particular caseworker always had time if I called instead of putting me in the routine queue, but nothing like that." I shrugged. "Still, it's not like I'm wasting my talents here, is it?"

"Not at all." he acknowledged. "And who knows, maybe it's just the drawdown."

"The drawdown?" I asked him.

"Shortly before I mustered out, the word around the Service was that they'd be easing off a bit on the pace of the military buildup to focus the economy on civilian growth instead. We've been running the war economy flat-out since before you were born, after all."

"I thought we'd already stepped down from wartime total mobilization and industrialization before 2160." I replied. "And I wasn't even in secondary-ed then."

"Well, apparently things have been peaceful enough coreward that the long-range projections all agree that nobody's going to pull another Kadur Eraasharshi in this generation. Which means the grand strategy is now to take a breather and use that to build up our colonial populations and civilian industrial base instead of putting it into more short-term applications. For one example, the new System Defense Boat project that's just coming out next year? The original schedule was for them to deploy in 2165, but they took it off of rush status and did it on a more relaxed budget."

"So they're still teaching 'Do Your Part!' to all us schoolkids, but the powers that be are shifting over to thinking in terms of peace dividends." I agreed, inwardly wincing at how I knew the next war was coming, but apparently nobody else believed it would be here remotely soon. Or were daring to hope it never arrived at all-

"What, you don't believe the optimists?" he asked me penetratingly. Yeah, my poker face was nowhere near enough to fool an old soldier like him.

"Warsaw." I replied simply.

"Yeah." he nodded firmly in agreement. "Still, nobody elected either of us Secretary-General, so the best we can do is hope we're the ones who were wrong."

I inwardly chewed my lip for a bit before I decided that if he was going to jump the conversation straight to where I'd been hoping it would go for the past couple of weeks instead of my sneaking up on it subtly, then I might as well ask it straight-out. "Apparently there's a lot I still don't know about Confederation recruitment and selection processes. Could you tell me a little more about it?"

* * * * *

"-everything your father was able to pick up from the grapevine on-base matches with what I've been hearing from the Free Traders returning to homeport here. Captain McDonald in particular had just finished a long circuit that had taken him all the way out to Shulgiasu-"

As I continued to listen to my parents' vidmail, part of my mind took a moment out to be mildly awestruck at just how deep into the Imperium that particular intrepid voyager had gone. Shulgiasu was the seat of the Saarpuhii Kushugii, the Vilani satrap in charge of the entire Imperial Rim Province, and the most direct route between it and Nusku required sixteen jumps with a jump-2 drive. Although it was only slightly over seven parsecs from Nusku in a straight line, the local astrographic layout meant that with the restrictions of jump-2 drive the only route there required you to go travel almost two whole subsectors to spinward - the astrographic equivalent of 'west' on starmaps, meaning 'in the direction of the rotation of the Milky Way's galactic disk' - then half a subsector coreward ('north', towards the galactic core) to reach the jump-2 route there, then back trailward ('east', or contrary to the galaxy's rotation) all the way past Nusku again to the provincial capital. Assuming a ship with infinite endurance that stopped only to calculate the next jump and leap again, that would still take slightly over four months. In more practical terms, it was a seven to eight month voyage-

"-and although of course he wasn't invited to share confidential political discussions with the Vilani high officialdom, it was widely known throughout the system that Kadur Erasharshi's political position had not substantially improved from the day he withdrew from the Third Interstellar War to avoid being ousted from his position at home. And given the usual glacial pace at which Vilani politics moves, that means that from everything we know right now we shouldn't have anything to worry about here for years and years."

My father's voice broke in. "Of course we're glad to hear that you're still settling in just fine and impressing your superiors with your hard work, and that there hasn't been any trouble like there was the first day you landed with that- troubled young man." he trailed off disapprovingly. "We all know that you haven't always found it easy fitting in with people your age. Have you been able to make any new friends among the other first-tour Public Service people, or are you still living inside your data console?"

He knows me all too well, I thought sheepishly.

"Although I'm certainly glad to hear that you're going above and beyond to distinguish yourself professionally, of course-"

Which is as close as he can come to saying 'I'm glad that the long-range plan for you to get into a responsible position where you can use the Celestial Forge to save the Confederation is still on track' in a digital communication-

"-and from your last message, I understand you were working on something that would get your name credited in an actual scientific publication! It being four jumps each way between Peraspera and Nusku means that two months will have come and gone by the time a message can make a round-trip between us, so hopefully you'll be able to let us know all about how it turned out in the end in your next vidmail to us."

"We love you, słoneczko." my mother chimed in, and my father echoed her. "Stay safe, and we'll wait to hear from you in February."

"Oh, and speaking of February - since it will be sometime in mid-March before our next vidmail can reach you, surprise! You're getting it now." my father chimed in impishly, before they both burst into song.

"Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Zofia
Happy birthday to you!"

An icon popped-up in the corner of my dataterminal's screen to let me know I had an incoming call, and the caller ID said it was Dr. Ward. I paused the vidmail that I'd gotten from my parents and collapsed the window, and opened up the vidchat program.

"Nowak." I acknowledged the call.

"Sophia, the Robert Haslam will be landing in half an hour." Dr. Ward said without preamble.

"I'll be right there." I answered him smartly, and he acknowledged me and the window blipped out. I got up, made sure my clothes were neat, took a last swipe at my face, and grabbed my already-packed carryall before out to join him and the other Project senior staff who were waiting to meet our visitors at Downport Reception.

The Haslam had been the ship that had carried the most recent round of mail here, as it was standard policy for any official Confederation vessel or postal-certified and bonded commercial vessel to carry any available mail that happaned to need forwarding to its destination. But the Colonial Bureau had hardly sent an entire 200-dton fast courier ship just to bring me an early birthday greeting from my parents, of course. No, she was here to carry several of the senior Project staff - and one junior un-graduate research assistant - back to Terra.

The Peraspera Terraforming Project was a very blue-sky long-range effort, given that Peraspera was a pre-garden world whose atmosphere was similar to what Earth's had been several billion years ago prior to the Great Oxygen Event. The main thrust of the Project had been figuring out a way to get the same type of worldwide cyanobacteria growth cycle started that had led to Earth's atmosphere becoming as saturated with oxygen as it had, but despite the best efforts of the molecular biology team to genetically engineer a suitable variant, even the strains that had shown promise in laboratory conditions failed in actual pilot projects in the field.

So the planetology and geology experts kept sampling and modeling as many subtle interactions in atmospheric and soil/water composition as they could to try and figure out any exact differences between Peraspera and what had been reconstructed about the Paleoprotozoic era of Terra that might explain the difficulty, the field teams kept taking out their contragrav air/rafts to drill for core samples and gather material from various regions of the planet, the climatologists and mathematicians kept trying to put together sims and analyses of all the mountains of raw data being gathered to make sense of it all, and one girl fresh out of secondary-ed had taken on and then successfully completed enough odd jobs, supplemental analyses, and other such technical tasks as they'd come up in turn to end up being listened to as an unofficial junior member of whatever one with the science teams she was 'liasing' with this week, seeing as how all the various different branches of effort of the Project began and ended at the central hub of statisticians and computer scientists of the data analysis/simulation team.

Which is why when my Forge-enhanced genius not only had a Newton-worthy stroke of genius regarding an obscure branch of chaos mathematics but my enhanced memory had integrated a round dozen separate obscure mentions both from the initial massive 'knowledge implant' that Well-Researched had given me and any number of texts, research papers, and even raw datasets I'd assimilated after coming here, I'd realized what the stumbling block almost certainly had to be.

It was the sulfur. Judging from the Terran fossil record, the atmospheric sulfur bloom that had ultimately fostered the cyanobacteria growth that had led to the Great Oxygen Event had been approximately (very approximately, given how tentative the measurements were when you were talking about trace elements in 2+ billion year old sedimentary rocks) a third lower than what was in Peraspera's atmosphere. Which of course the Project had already known for years - they weren't idiots - but which even the molecular biologists here hadn't realized all the implications of, because unless you also a memory with superhuman cross-referencing capacity - which they hadn't - then you wouldn't have put together the pieces that the adaptations made to the cyanobacteria for higher sulfur tolerance, which ultimately dated back to a decades-old industrial genetic engineering application for a particular strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria used in agriculture, also meant that the damn microorganism was just marginally intolerant enough of chlorine ions that you couldn't use it in salt water. Which of course nobody had ever noticed before because you didn't irrigate crops with salt water, but which certainly ruined the whole deal when you were trying to get an algae bloom started in an ocean.

But even after my 'Eureka!' moment - and then persuading Dr. Ward and Dr. Michel, our chief molecular biologist, that I actually wasn't talking out of my hat - the microbiology team had hit stone wall number two, as it turned out that thanks to certain subtleties of protein folding in the original root design, there just wasn't any way to work around the ion incompatibility without also moving the sulfur tolerance range out of something useful for Peraspera. So it was a catch-22. We couldn't shift the atmospheric balance of the planet enough to where the sulfur/oxygen ratio would be tolerable for the original strain of cyanobacteria they'd been working on without at least the beginnings of an oxygen bloom, and we couldn't get the oxygen bloom without a workable strain of cyanobacteria in the field. So at this point it looked like the Project's hope was to start from first principles and do a whole lot of designing an entirely new class of microorganism from scratch, which given how genetic engineering was a hit-or-miss proposition for anything too complex even in the 22nd century - to skip over a lot of complicated mathematics, the number of possible permutations the same DNA molecule could have depending on protein fold variation was somewhere between 'yikes!' and 'eek!' - looked to be a very, very long and expensive proposition.

Or, as a certain junior research assistant pointed out, you could just cut the Gordian knot and start your initial oxygen bloom prep in a giant freshwater inland sea. And if the planet you were on happened to be inconveniently devoid of those, well, then you could just make one.

Which is why several of the seniormost staff - and said junior research assistant - were now grabbing their carryalls and making a trip back for a high-level scientific conference with senior Colonial Bureau officials and equally senior scientific experts.

After all, when you were going to ask for permission to deliberately crash a comet into an inhabited world, then you certainly didn't do that by vidmail.

* * * * *

Author's Note: Still not quite satisfied with the pacing on this chapter, but I wanted to get in both some establishing character moments, an overview of the terraforming project, some more historical background, and her first noteworthy scientific achievement. As for her relations with her peer group... did anyone notice that she didn't actually devote narrative space to saying goodbye to any close friends from high school upon leaving Earth? Just one mention of some nameless people she knew from school in passing, and over and done? That was deliberate.

Plus, of course, we got in our first actual perk purchases. Note that the list of purchases and exact perk descriptions will be maintained in the Mechanics post on the first page of this thread, bookmarked right after the introductory section.

And so she takes her first significant step into a larger world.

In conclusion, I would like to think WaNoMatsuri for his advice on getting in at least a couple of suitably Polish pronunciations and loanwords. Not that I speak a word of the language, but I can at least Google.

Unspent CP: 0
Purchases: Genius Intellect (SyFy Combined Continuity), Programmer (World Seed)

cliffc999 · Nov 17, 2022

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)

cliffc999 · Nov 19, 2022

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)

cliffc999 · Nov 23, 2022

I sat on the edge of the barrier, fully five meters high and almost equally as thick an expanse of fusion-formed ceramacrete, and stared down between my feet at the Atlantic Ocean.

The environmental crisis of the early 21st century had been the first impetus behind making the United Nations more than a toothless advisory body, with sheer impetus of survival at last forcing the great nations of the world to concede at least some actual regulatory authority - and the wherewithal to back it up - to an international organization. The Treaty of New York in 2024 had been a massive political compromise that no one had enjoyed, least of all the former Security Council permanent member nations. Especially not considering that one of the provisos of that treaty had been revising the UN Charter so that the Security Council would be dissolved and replaced by the Advisory Board, which did not have the 'veto' provision but instead merely required a two-thirds majority vote.

But when coastal areas on three continents were already starting to see the tide line inch closer and closer to flooding their streets then even bitterly hated change could find itself accepted, however reluctantly. So despite all the concerns from the major nations that their international authority and sovereignty would be diluted and the widespread fear among many minor nations that any movement towards one-world government would be in effect an empire that they would forever enjoy second-class status in, the first major steps in that direction were taken anyway because all the other alternatives were worse. Even though a true one-world sovereignty underneath the Terran Confederation - complete with the abolishment of national military power and a full consolidation into the Confederation Armed Forces - would take the arrival of the Vilani to make even halfway palatable. As is, even over half a century later nationalist and separatist terrorism was still simmering at low boil in more than a few nations, and the Confederation Army had "civil affairs" and "disaster relief" deployments in at least two places on Terra's surface at this very moment that were actually counter-insurrection and peacekeeping detachments in all but name. Not that any single nation - not even the United States, let alone one of the smaller nations in Africa or Southeast Asia - could hope to resist the full might of the Confederation, not without suborning enough of the Navy and the Army to make it a Confederation-shattering civil war and not merely a secession movement. But of course, nobody ever wanted it to even begin to get that far, particularly not with the Vilani still out there.

Still, despite all that the United Nations and then later the Confederation had done to reverse the environmental degradation, along with the invention of fusion power allowing both independence from fossil fuels and economically viable wide-scale recycling due to the abundance of cheap, clean energy, the rise of the oceans had not been stopped until overall water levels had risen over two meters all around the world, and while no further rises were projected nobody was projecting that the ocean level would decrease any time soon either. Which, considering how many millions of people worldwide lived in coastal areas less than one meter above the tide line, meant that giant barrier walls like the one I was currently sitting on were familiar pieces of architecture on five continents. And as a monument to the unintended consequences of unrestrained technological process, as well as a testament to the ability of said progress to eventually help alleviate many of the problems that it had caused in the first place, I'd decided that the Cambridge Seawall was an appropriate place for me to sit and do some serious thinking.

I was self-aware enough to know that my panic reaction at destroying the Ceph nanotechnology several days ago had been precisely that, a panic reaction. I'd gone through my initial chain of reasoning at great speed and with sheer force of adrenaline powering my thoughts, then executed my decision before I could stop and think again. And I was also entirely aware that human brains were very good at post hoc rationalizing of things you'd decided to do anyway. But for all that I was still more than a bit shaken up by the whole experience, no matter how many times I ran it through in my head I kept returning to the same conclusion I'd initially reached.

Part of why I'd been so shaken the past several days was my realization that part of me actually might be capable of committing genocide. Of dehumanizing the enemy to the point that 'several trillion dead' became nothing more than a statistic to me. And what the heck was wrong with me that I'd felt even that momentary an impulse? Did I truly hate the Vilani that much? Lord knows that "Do Your Part!" and all the other patriotic slogans that I'd been raised on didn't exactly encourage a worldview of not fearing the Vilani and wishing to remove their imminent threat to the Terran Confederation, but there was a rather large gap between wanting a stronger military and eliminating almost 99% of the known human population of the galaxy!

For all that I was a survivor of Warsaw, and that too many of my family hadn't been, my parents hadn't raised me to lust for vengeance over it. If anything, they'd always tried to tone down any depth of feeling on the issue, both in me and in themselves. After all, we were Polish. Our homeland had been the victim of attempted cultural genocide for centuries. We had no natural borders and everyone wanted to conquer us as their road map to everywhere else. There were other ethnic groups on Terra that had an even worse history in that regard than we did, many of them with that history far more well-known to the planet at large, but obscure or not we were still well up towards the top. Everybody knew the famous saying about what you risked when fighting monsters.

And everybody also liked to believe that they were a good person who had lived a good life, and I'd certainly tried my best to do that so far. So finding out that any part of me, however deeply buried, was capable of feeling even an impulse to actually do it... well, some people might call it moral cowardice on my part to have immediately destroyed the sample to foreclose any possibility that future me might eventually succumb to that impulse. But if you knew what your weakness was, then it was your responsibility to deny yourself at least the easy opportunities to succumb to it. Recovering alcoholics sholdn't keep beer in their freezer, people with anger management problems and prior assault convictions shouldn't go out partying with football hooligans, and people who'd found out that their moral compasses had a software fault in them somewhere to the point where a genocidal act was even a momentary temptation shouldn't hang on to the most advanced nanotech WMD ever seen in the universe. But no. All of the above was true to a point, but after I'd sat myself down and forced myself to confront it I finally worked out the real reason I'd felt even a momentary temptation.

I'd been afraid.

The more I studied the problem, the worse it looked. I already had access to at least one technology that could utterly upset the current balance of power, and even if I never earned another point of CP from the Forge I still had enough banked and enough options to purchase that I could find more. It was likely that I could invent at least one or two of my own from scratch just from the genius and knowledge I already had, particularly given that even without the Ceph nanotech sample I still retained all the insights that Bolthole Protocol had already obtained from my initial studies of it. But I couldn't see any way yet to turn any of those possibilities into a Terran victory, because I was neatly and deeply impaled on the horns of a catch-22.

The Vilani tech base was extremely mature, stable, and resistant to innovation - but that wasn't because they were incapable of it. Everything that they had now, they'd originally invented for themselves at one time in the past. Quod erat demonstratum, the Vilani gene pool was potentially capable of producing creative geniuses. Even if they were apparently much rarer there than here - and that was still just me guessing - they still existed, and I was living proof that if the discovery were groundbreaking enough then you only needed one genius to change things. And there were trillions of Vilani to help improve those odds. And reverse-engineering was substantially easier than discovery.

So I didn't just have to invent something wondrous enough to break the stalemate. I had to invent something wondrous enough to break the stalemate and that the Vilani could not reverse-engineer to regain the advantage. Because as greatly as they outnumbered us in both population, resources, and industrial base? If Terra and the Vilani ever fought a "total war" with even mostly equivalent tech, then Terra was dead. We'd only survived so far because the Vilani hadn't fought any of the Interstellar Wars that way. Hell, Kadur Erasharshi had been noteworthy in being the first Vilani fleet commander to even want to take his fleets all the way to Terra, and he'd also been noteworthy as the first Vilani fleet commander to not only succeed in doing so but to nuke our planetary surface. Which was a very disturbing trend. Especially considering that he'd only withdrawn because domestic political concerns had forced him to, not because we'd forced him back.

Looking at that in hindsight, the Confederation's current attitude of 'peace dividend!' seemed less of a well-reasoned analysis and more of an urgent need to mentally blot out very ugly truth about how precipitous our long-range position still was. Which hunch of mine had no guarantee of being accurate, of course but if it was accurate... well, I suppose there was a reason the Forge had given me the warning that it had about Terra's unaided chances in a Fourth Interstellar War.

So. What the heck could I invent for Earth that would give us the win, but that wouldn't give the Vilani the win if they ever figured out how we'd made it? Seeing as how they had thousands of planets to our dozen-plus, and trillions of people to our billions? Seeing as how I had to presume the Vilani would figure it out eventually, unless we somehow managed to not only defeat the entire Imperium but do so relatively quickly? I had no idea.

... except for that one option I'd already found. One overwhelmingly deadly, insidious, and unstoppable option that would have removed the Vilani from the face of the universe before they even knew why, let alone who.

So yes. I now knew exactly why I'd felt the temptation. Because the cold equations had stated that using the Ceph nanotech to its fullest, most horrifying potential was the first real chance of victory that I'd discovered. And possibly the only real chance of victory that I ever would discover.

I sighed and drew the metaphorical deep breath, readying myself to take the plunge. I forced myself to shunt aside anger and fear and consider the problem as clearly as I could, taking it as a problem, and subordinating superstition and dogma to reason.

Because the cold equations could just go fuck themselves.

If I drove myself insane in the process of trying to win, I would only lose. And then everyone would lose, because a madwoman with the power that I could hypothetically yield could potentially be a catastrophe worse than a Vilani conquest, both for us Terrans and them. And it was simply not possible for me to be emotionally indifferent enough to committing several trillion murders by my own hand to not psychologically shatter in the process of so doing... not unless I'd already gone completely psychotic in a different direction before I even started trying. I had to maintain my faith in a higher power. I had to believe that even if I had no idea what form it could possibly take yet, there was a possible route to victory that wouldn't need me to sacrifice my own soul in the process. I had to hope.

I stood up and nodded out east towards the horizon, towards my far-away home.

Time to get back to work.

My newfound resolution did not send me back into the lab, because I'd also come to the conclusion that I'd need to put advanced scientific research on the back burner for a while and refocus my efforts in another direction. I hadn't just given up on trying to obtain a more in-depth understanding of Vilani society and culture after my first attempt at recovering Captain Dubicki's notes from his privateering expedition behind-the-lines during hte Second Interstellar War had failed, and thanks to an unofficial double major in history and the power of collegiate interlibrary loan I'd managed to obtain them through the MIT library. Along with as many other source materials in the same field of interest as I could manage to get my hands on, because while I was hardly going to get anyone to give me access to the classified War College level material and analyses - yet - for obvious reasons there was also a thriving interest in academia for Vilani cultural and social analysis of all kinds on a non-classified level, some of it generously funded by Confederation grants. And the warnings of student advisors afraid of the latest wunderkind giving herself a serious case of burnout and overwork were followed by me more in the breach than in the observance, and so I managed to cram a lot of that in.

Plus, I actually did take some down time to go do things like play tourist and have fun and otherwise touch some grass. Not as much of it as some people would have liked, but I'd already had one brief approach to an anxiety spiral when I'd buried myself too deeply in research and I didn't want another one, thanks. Besides, I'd never been in the United States before and even almost a century and a half after the Treaty of New York, North America was still one of the two most economically and culturally dominant continents of Terra.

But soon enough I finally got my hands on not just Captain Dubicki's autobiography but the full logs and unpublished journals of his years behind the lines during the Second Interstellar War, as well as his career as a Free Trader prior to the start of that war. And while a lot of what he'd said had merely been expansions and context to what I already knew about Vilani society and culture, some of it was a legitimate surprise.

For one thing, I had never heard the term kimashargur before. Although in contemporary Vilani parlance it meant 'dissident', it had actually been a Vilani separatist movement that had occurred over a thousand years ago.

Now I'd already known, as did any Terran schoolchild, that although the Vilani had been in space since the neolithic era on Terra the current Vilani Imperium - or Ziru Sirka as they called it, the "Grand Empire of Stars" - had been formalized only circa AD 500. Presided over by a ruling council of their highest nobility called the Igsiirdi, who elected one of their own each generation as the Emperor, it had come about as the result of a period of strife called 'the Consolidation Wars' that had ended the great age of Vilani expansion... and that was about as much as the Vilani, or what school textbooks of theirs we could obtain, had really wanted to talk about it.

But what they hadn't wanted to talk about with us Terrans as the fact was the fact that circa AD 800 a movement called the Kimashargur, or "Virtue of the Foremost", had become popular in several of the Vilani rimward sectors - including the one adjoining Terra. Captain Dubicki had actually had a kimashargur crewman onboard his vessel, hired prior to the start of the war as a translator and cultural consultant, who'd loyally fought at his side throughout the entire war. (Something that his official biography, or at least the one I'd read in school, had not mentioned in an obvious case of Confederation censorship.) And of course he'd talked his captain's ear off about what his forebears had taught him about the old days, even if it had been as garbled as incomplete as an oral tradition handed down through centuries of state control of education crushing the very concept outo of official mention could be expected to be.

The short version is that the kimashargur had wanted to renew the Vilani expansion into the galaxy and continue with the grand pace of technological innovation that had brought them to their current height, and the Imperium hadn't wanted to. So they went from minority political party to dissident movement to outlawed forbidden society, and some of them had ben able to escape the Imperial crackdown circa 1000 AD to travel beyond the then Imperial borders and set up their own independent colonies on the Vilani rim. The Vilani world of Dingir, 6 parsecs away from Nusku as the photon travelled and only 4 jumps away via accessible jump-2 routes, had actually been the capital of their pocket empire.

And then the Vilani Imperium had caught up to them in 1100 AD and reconquered their separatists, and that was the end of that. The kimashargur today were nothing more than a convenient blame-word in contemporary Vilani lexicon to refer to any kind of malcontent, and some fragmentary legends passed on down from one generation to another. But it was surprising to find out that if the Vilani Imperium had just been a little more complacent about letting their separatists and wildcatters go, then Earth might well have been discovered by the Kimashargur separatists well before we'd gotten into space on our own, with what effects on history I could only begin to imagine. As is, the mining outpost at Barnard's Star that StarLeaper One had contacted were technically kimashargur, having sort of not quite officially gotten an exploration permit from the Vilani authorities before going off to prospect for minerals in a strange star system. Although being discovered by the Terrans had made them immediately rush to report the contact to the Imperial authorities, so maybe not that outlaw.

But even this much was a clue. It told me that Vilani society was, while tremendously conformist from everything Terrans had seen and with a political stability that looked positively glacial compaerd to ours, still not absolutely monolithic. They had the impulses of divisiveness and curiosity just as the Terran strain of humanity did, they just seemed to deal with them in very different ways and with a far greater decree of polish and/or subtlety.

Definitely food for thought. Also definitely bringing to mind some new questions to ask if I ever had a chance to talk to a Vilani.

... hmmm. I wonder where the Beowulf is right now?

I chewed my lip in thought as I started composing an email. Between the speed of jump-mail and their itinerant schedule, building up a correspondence with Captain Urshargii again to the point he actually might talk to me about such things would take time. Still, sooner started, sooner done...

* * * * *

One of the things I had learned from the Ceph nanotech before I'd destroyed it was how they were able to fit that much computational capacity inside a nanite that small. Granted, nanites were very small - if you had a nanocomputing element small enough to fit 1 flops' worth of computational capacity instead a particular 1 nanometer on a side, then even with a 99% design inefficiency for your overall distributed computing array you could still get 10^16 flops' worth of computing power into a cubic millimeter. But the Ceph went beyond that to somehow fit a quantum computing dot into each nanite, meaning that the collective computational capacity of any given mass of Ceph nanotech was so vast that their only real bottleneck was coming up with software that could actually use it.

I felt a major pang of regret at having burned the thing, because my life would be so much simpler if I was able to put that kind of computational capacity into a little knickknack I could carry in my pocket. Sadly, I didn't have the tools to make the tools to make the tools to make more Ceph nano q-dots, even if I could have commanded the sample to arbitrarily self-replicate more of itself. But what I could do with that innovation is reduce many of the techniques I'd reverse-engineered back to first principles, then start applying them from the ground up again towards already-existing contemporary experiments into molecular circuitry blocks. Because integrated circuit design had already started to intersect with quantum theory in the early 21st century, when CPU paths became measured and spaced in so small a unit of nanometers that quantum interference effects began to become a concern, and nowadays making a modern molecular circuitry unit was as much art as science given that the math of such complex 3-dimensional potential interactions was only partly understood.

Until now, because with the example of the Ceph nanotech to work from I had been handed the product of at least centuries' worth of R&D efforts in the field to work from. Ceph technology was at least as thoroughly worked out, as thoroughly polished, as Vilani technology was. They'd stuck with the same basic principles and designs long enough to work out every single possible bug and irregularity in the field, then micrometrically file off every metaphorical rough spot until what was left was as precise and smooth as a geometric equation. It was the sort of thinking that rejected the entire Terran concept of an 'R&D cycle', but while it was horrible for speed of progress it certainly did wonderful things for reliability. Even Terrans used that philosophy from time to time - in addition to the historical examples of the Kalashnikov rifle or the M2 .50-caliber machine gun, the United States' old NASA space agency had originally taken mankind to the Moon using spacecraft computers at least one generation more primitive than the best they'd known how to build precisely because you got much fewer surprises from older designs as opposed to cutting-edge and they were operating under conditions where one significant hardware fault risked stranding three men hundreds of thousands of miles away from any possible recovery. Goodness, just look at what had almost happened to Apollo 13!

And with that kind of knowledge to work from, working out a mathematical breakthrough that absolutely revolutionized the field of molecular circuit design to the point that an almost full order of magnitude increase in efficiency would be possible once someone translated my theories into hardware. Because the Ceph's understanding of quantum interference effects at that supreme a level of miniaturization and how to avoid them had of necessity been vastly ahead of our own, and all I had to do was draw upon even the beginnings of their insights to actually qualify as a revolutionary leap forward by Terran standards. I'd originally arrived at MIT several weeks into the 2167 fall semester, but I'd timed my 'discovery' for midway through the 2168 spring semester - or a couple months before my scheduled graduation, as I'd managed to work in enough course credit to be able to matriculate within a year. I could have done it much more quickly than that, of course, but I'd had reasons for pacing myself.

For one, I didn't want to entirely explode the suspension of disbelief in my case. Being on track to be a leading genius of the age was not only desirable for me but necessary, but going too far beyond that ran the risk of provoking fear instead of wonder. I wanted authority figures to see me as a golden goose, not an eldritch abomination. One of the things that had slowed down my research into the Ceph nanotech as much as it had been slowed had been the fact that I'd needed to be very careful about getting unobserved lab time, as well as using my programming genius to the utmost to make sure that the laboratory systems didn't record me doing anything but my officially approved research. Because even if you were a trusted enough student to have unsupervised time with the equipment, of course the software was still recording everything you did with it. In addition to safety and liability concerns, the instrument logs were part of your grades for lab period! Thank the Forge for my super-programming abilities or else I'd never have been able to hack those things, because for obvious reasons they made academic reliability software on the campus of Terra's leading tech university as hack-proof as they possibly could.

Which is one reason I'd chosen to make my next breakout discovery in the field of pure mathematics, because you didn't need any research logs to back that up. Math was something you could do in the privacy of your room with a paper and pencil if you wanted, and my meticulously filled-out proofs and theorems and calculations didn't need date stamps to exist. So I turned it in as an independent study project, and waited for the academic staff to freak out at the Fields Medal-worthy work I'd just done. (There was no Nobel Prize in Mathematics.)

Although I was surprised when I showed up for the interview with the chairman of the Mathematics department that I'd been asked to report for and was instead greeted by Mr. Dumonte... the placement officer at the PSB that I'd spoken to after returning from Peraspera.

"You're not really a PSB placement officer, are you sir?" I said, sitting politely down in front of the chairman's borrowed desk.

"Oh, I am." he said amiably. "But I also have additional duties ."

"Office of Naval Intelligence?" I probed.

"No, but one of my colleagues is." he nodded to me in acknowledgement of the point. "And another is a representative of DARPA, and a third represents the Ministry of Education. In addition there is also Dr. Ahmedi, who you've already met."

"The testing psychologist at Mumbai." I agreed. "So... some type of multi-agency project whose job it is to find and recruit geniuses." I stated, rather than asked.

"And now we've found you." he smiled back. "Although you can't be too surprised at that, given that you were clearly trying to attract our attention."

"Well, someone's attention." I agreed. "I hadn't known it was you, specifically."

"We do our best to remain in the background." he agreed. "In addition to the part where it enables our work, we prefer a very soft touch when dealing with extremely intelligent people. Putting opportunities in their path provokes far less resentment than dictating choices."

"But I'm getting an open recruitment offer." I said. "What's different in my case?"

"From your IQ tests alone, if nothing else, you are already aware that you are not merely very intelligent but intelligent on a scale beyond any other known case." he said. "That's one reason. There are several others. But the debate over whether to continue long-range monitoring on you or to approach you openly was still ongoing... until we finally received the results of your ONI background investigation."

I gulped inwardly, and my brain finally caught up to the realization that there was almost certainly instrumentation rigged here to analyze my voice-stress patterns and bio-readings. I'd been talking on a lie detector for this entire conversation, and it was a damn good thing I hadn't actually lied yet! But-

I raised an eyebrow in an obvious inquiry and didn't say a word.

"'To save the Confederation'?" he asked me, with a raised eyebrow of his own. My faultless memory prompted me with instant recall of exactly when I'd said that during the celebration on Peraspera, and to who. Damn. Mr. Stepczinski had been right, I really shouldn't have had that second glass of vodka.

"I'd hoped it hadn't stuck in his head." I conceded, because of course a complete Top Secret clearance background investigation would interview your former employers and supervisors among others, and of course the retired Chief Warrant Officer Stepczinski would have cooperated fully with the ONI in detailing anything weird or suspicious I might have said - particularly if it was vivid enough to still be in his memory months later. "And yes, the obvious question that statement begs is 'To save it from what?'' I sighed and decided there was no real way out but through. "The Vilani, of course."

His lips narrowed slightly in reaction, if not surprise. "The analysts project that the current peace will continue for at least a generation, now that we've firmly established ourselves as not worth the cost it would take to conquer us." he stated the official party line. "Why don't you believe that?"

"I can't rigorously prove it with charts and graphs." I replied, which was true. "But... it's not just a hunch, it's a recurring worry on my part." Also true. "I mean... all else aside, what if the analysts are wrong? If you don't know, but a wrong guess in one direction means you only went to some inconvenient effort and a wrong guess in the other directions you lose everything forever, which direction you guess in is obvious."

"Pascal's Wager, only applied to interstellar politics." he acknowledged. "That makes sense, but it doesn't usually drive someone to dedicate their life to a project of single-handedly averting it."

"It was hardly going to be single-handed." I said, doing my best to defuse his worries. "As you opened the conversation with, I was clearly trying to attract attention. The Confederation's attention. I'd hoped to be recruited for advanced research, to build... well, better chances." I eventually found the right words. "For the Confederation. For humanity."

"Sophia, I'm sure you learned very early on about how to tell other people what they want to hear." he eventually said mildly. "But what do you want?"

Crap, he's good. Entirely ignored the shiny bait and is staying on target like a point-defense laser.

"I wanted..." I sighed and let the bitterness flow out of me. "I wanted to be an ordinary girl. I wanted to fit in, to find a career, to make my family proud, but..." I blinked back a tear. "To just be as responsible as anyone else had to be, not to be... this." I waved at myself. "To find out that I had a singular talent, a something extra, that lets me do what even I'm only beginning to figure out the limits of. To see things, figure things out, that potentially scare the pants off me." I sighed. "But I didn't get a choice. I have these gifts, and I have to figure out how I can use them best. And yes, I also have normal human desires like not being poor or the approval buzz of having a major science advancement for humanity credit me with success and all that, but at the risk of sounding egotistical, I'm really not expecting that part to be hard for me." I paused, and waited for him to show a reaction before I shrugged and continued without it. "I want to not be afraid anymore." I trailed off faintly.

Because if I really was under a lie detector right now, then my only hope of steering this conversation away from the really dangerous topics was if I could make honest feelings do some dishonest work.

"You feel single-handedly responsible for the defense of the Confederation?" he probed after a thoughful pause.

"I believe that due to my genius and aptitudes, I am capable of making contributions to that defense that few if any others can." I said carefully. "And that having the capability to do that, considering the current galactic situation, means that I have a responsibility to."

"But you turned down multiple chances for military enlistment?" he asked.

"I can take orders like an employee from a supervisor, especially in a research position, but military discipline probably wouldn't be the best fit for me when my brain kept moving multiple times faster than my officer's." I conceded. "Also, earning any real seniority in the Navy would take so much time, but like I already found out on Peraspera, nobody cares how young you are at a science roundtable if your math works out."

"That's not always true, depending on the lab environment." he said. "Still, yes, your strategy has worked out quite well for you. So... if you were me, what would you do in my position?"

"You said that you've already run a Top Secret background investigation on me, and if I'd failed it you wouldn't be here at all." I thought out loud. "So I have the clearance necessary to work in a defense research lab, and I've certainly proven my scientific bona fides. But you've already decided not to do that, or else I'd have just had a corporate or DARPA recruiter approach me at the pre-graduation job fair like any other student. So I would offer me a chance to prove myself in the field. What exactly that would entail, I can't guess at without knowing what resources and influence you actually have available to you."

"An excellent analysis..." he steepled his fingers dramatically before continuing. "... but if you've ever had any belief that you are infallible, you have just proven that you are not. Because while you were partially correct in your reasoning, offer is not exactly the verb I would use."

"Wait, are you saying-?!?" I sat up bolt upright as with his final clue it all suddenly fell into place for me.

"Exactly." he nodded to me. "Sophia Anna Nowak, you've been drafted."

* * * * *

Author's Note: I could have gone longer, but sometimes you just reach the perfect cliffhanger point. And so, short chapter.

Regarding the Treaty of New York and all affiliated matters: I do not want to have to remind anyone here of Rule 8. At least, not more than the one warning I have already put in this author's note. Regardless of opinions on the topic of climate change or anything else, we do not need to discuss them here. Not only is this a fictional universe, but Sophia's own beliefs on the topic are not in any way supposed to be presented as the author's beliefs. She believes what she does because it would be implausible for her to believe anything else given her education and background, so she believes it. What I believe is irrelevant.

And yes, this is legal. There's a reason that Sophia keeps referring to her initial Public Service tour, and that's because the mandatory service term of 4 years is just the traditional beginning. The Confederation has the option of recalling anyone to active service up until age 40, although for obvious reasons this is normally done only in time of war.

Normally. A state of war is not actually required. And the genius patrol gets to do a lot of things with the bureaucracy that it does not normally do.

Unspent CP: 400

cliffc999 · Dec 1, 2022

My shock at Mr. Dumonte's suddenly drafting me into the Navy lasted through not only the ride to the Induction Center but the formal administering of the oath of enlistment. It boggled the mind that after so much indirect observation, after he'd just told me that they preferred to use a "very soft touch", It wasn't until I'd finished storing all my civilian possessions and was being yelled at by a drill instructor to shut up, stand on the line, and wait for the shuttle along with all the other new meat that I finally realized what this whole situation was.

It was a test.

Not of my intelligence; I'd already more than proven that. They were testing my character. There were testing my patience, my self-restraint, my willingness to obey orders and defer gratificfation. Extremely brilliant young people who thought they knew everything weren't always noted for their moderation. And if their team had been finding and placing people of very high intelligence for any great length of time, then statistically it was extremely likely they'd already run into at least a few complete dupeks. They might even have had someone attempt to deliberately game their system. And I had actually had an extremely close call with making an extremely bad decision with an extremely horrifying bit of mad science, even if they didn't know about it.

... at least, I was mostly certain that they didn't know about it.

So yes, in hindsight Mr. Dumonte's demeanor during our conversation seemed to have been that of someone who hadn't been entirely sure of what he was dealing with. He'd been probing me, hitting me up for reactions, and...

"Sophia, I'm sure you learned very early on about how to tell other people what they want to hear. But what do you want?"

But despite his best efforts as an interviewer, I'd still been a mystery to him. Apparently I'd been a mystery to their whole evaluating committee, whoever or whatever it actually was. And if they'd had so much as one really bad experience with a prior genius, then it was entirely rational for them to not want to buy any pigs in a poke. And so while they probably hadn't made up their minds to draft me before calling me in, I was certain that they'd already wargamed out several possible responses ahead of time before even starting the interview, and Mr. Dumonte had decided while talking to me that the 'Draft her' option was the best one to respond with.

Achievement Unlocked: Raise Ship!
(Enlist In The Terran Confederation Navy)
Reward: 200 CP

And so I'd spent the next six months sweating it out as the youngest officer candidate in my class. Three months of Basic Officer's Course, intended to take people who already had a college degree but no military experience and train them in basic military skills while at the same time intensely evaluating them for the fitness and aptitude to become commissioned officers in the Confederation Navy, and then three months of actual Officer's Candidate School alongside the Navy enlisted men who'd been selected for officer track. Twelve-plus hours a day, six days a week, of busting my hump physically and mentally.

The mentally had been no trouble, of course. Being the class leader in everything academic or intellectually testable was not really a challenge for me. The physical fitness, on the other hand... ugh. I thought I'd been in good shape before, but that was by civilian standards. I'd seriously considered just tapping out and quitting at a couple points. And it wasn't just running and pushups, either. Basic weapons training, vacc suit training (again, and much more intensely this time), zero-G maneuvering, EVA exercises, even a couple weeks in orbit being run through a not-so-simulated series of spaceship disasters as part of the introduction to damage control training... everything that an able spacehand had to know in order to at least not get anyone else killed on a starship in combat. In addition there were all the stress tests, the 'let's see if you panic when they cut the oxygen off' exercise, the deliberate working you to exhaustion and then making you do tactical problems or field exercises, because an officer had to be able to function in combat despite already being beat to hell, and all the rest of it... all culminating in "The Crusher", a three-day test to destruction where you were lucky if you got so much as three hours' sleep.

And this was this was supposed to be the easy version. The Marines got a twelve-week conditioning course before OCS, and theirs ended in "The Grinder" - one entire week of hell.

So, this was their solution to running into someone smart enough that ordinary psychological testing didn't work on them, and even one of their best and most experienced interviewers didn't fully trust his bullshit detector in a face-to-face. Send them into the Crusher and everything associated with it, under circumstances where nobody could faultlessly keep up an act for that many entire months and where exhaustion and stress would magnify any impulses to the point that even subtle faults would become visible. Which was actually the entire point of any boot camp or officer candidate evaluation course to begin with - to find as many mental weaknesses in the prospective candidates as possible and make them pop loose before you actually send them into the field, when it was still early enough to just painlessly wash them out back to civilian life.

Pretty clever on the part of Mr. Dumonte and friends, when you looked at it that way. Whatever my mental malfunctions were - and their instincts were not wrong to have been sniffing something funny because I was actually hiding significant stuff from them, just as I'd been hiding the truths about the Celestial Forge and me having an eldritch force in my head from everyone else - Basic Officer's Course and the Crusher would give them a very good chance at seeing it, even if nothing else they'd tried so far had. And if I failed out then I just went back into civilian life, and they could just have some friend in a defense contractor's offer me a job then. After all, I'd still need to earn a living.

And if I didn't fail out? Well, then I'd be subject to military discipline for the duration, and go where I was told and do what I was told. Just as I'd told Mr. Dumonte that I'd wanted to do, to serve the Confederation. So here they were, taking me at my word.

Or maybe, I eventually came to speculate, they were just so not used to dealing with a peg as square as me. I did, after all, completely and supernaturally violate everything they'd ever learned about human learning speed or normal R&D progress curves, even if they had very little clue as to how deeply I violated those or why. And maybe they were doing this just to try and fit me back into a round hole they could understand. After all, even if they by all appearances were senior, well-connected, and highly competent bureaucrats they were still bureaucrats, and bureaucracies were not historically great at adapting to big exceptions to the rules they understood until and unless you rubbed their noses in it. So perhaps my being drafted wasn't so much a cunning plan as a reversion to type.

Maybe. Until and unless the Forge started giving me mind-reading powers, I'd probably never really know. Then again, I didn't really need to know. I just had to figure out what to do next.

But that was a problem for future Sophia. Present Sophia was at her OCS graduation ceremony, raising her right hand and being sworn in as a commissioned officer in the Terran Confederation Navy.

"I, Sophia Nowak, do solemnly swear and affirm that I will support and defend the Terran Confederation against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Confederation Charter, that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

Achievement Unlocked: Ninety-Day Wonder
(Graduate Officer Candidate School)
Reward: 200 CP

I had my insignia pinned on me, collected my from the senior chief petty officer who'd been our OCS class' instructor as per tradition, and stood quietly to one side after the formation had been dismissed letting it all sink in. Even despite a certain amount of impatience on my part at having spent this many months away from doing any research or serious academic study, I was not indifferent to the sheer weight of the tradition that I was now an ongoing part of. The Navy was the Confederation's senior service, both the tip of the spear and the shield wall standing between Terra and the Vilani, and while it was only several decades old it drew its heritage and history from the navies of the Confederation member nations that had contributed to form it in the first place. I was the latest ensign in the latest generation to stand as an inheritor - however partial - of the legacy of men like Nimitz, Ushakov, Nelson, Jones, and Yi. As well as the legacies, and sacrifices, of many many humbler men both recorded and unrecorded throughout history, who'd all loyally stood their watches and manned their guns - and, if necessary, had died at their posts. And even though I hadn't planned on joining the Navy at all, I still wasn't indifferent to that.

Mom and Dad hadn't been able to make it back to Terra for my graduation - with Nusku 3 jumps out from Terra, it was almost a month each way just in travel time - and I didn't really have an extended family for obvious reasons, so there was nobody here at Luna Base to watch me graduate. And that actually stung a lot more than I'd expected it too. Oh, it would only cost a few sols to have a copy of the video record of the graduation ceremony sent out to them, but that just wasn't the same. Still, lonely graduation or not, I positively burned with eagerness at having finally passed this hurdle - all six nigh-endless months of it - and the prospect of actually being allowed to get some real work done.

"What?" I couldn't help gasping incredulously when I received my orders.

"You are to report aboard CSS Gladstone, homeported out of Nusku, to be her new Electronic Warfare Officer ma'am." the bored petty officer in the assignments office repeated to me.

"That is not anywhere near even the type of assignment I was expecting, or had applied for." I replied slowly with as much diplomacy of which I was capable. "Obviously BuPers had a reason to disagree with me there, but did anybody note on the file what that reason might have been?"

He raised an eyebrow, apparently at my having managed to avoid the usual 'But I didn't wanna go there!' whining that he often got from new ensigns like me, and tapped his touchscreen several times. "No ma'am, there's no special notations on your file. No flags, no gigs, nothing to show that you're on anybody's shit list." he continued, speaking to me like a human. "Everything looks entirely routine. I guess you just drew the low card."

"By any chance, do you have someone else in my class who was up for a shipyard or R&D posting that wanted space service?" I thought out loud. "Because if so, I'll go ask them if they want to swap out."

"Good idea." he complimented me, and went to look up something on his screen. "Unfortunately, no."

"Gladstone." I thought out loud. "The naming convention means it's one of the new Bannerjee-class SDBs, isn't it?"

"Yes ma'am." he said. "Commissioned just six months ago... huh, that's odd." he thought out loud.

"Why do they need a new EWO after only six months?" I agreed.

"Doesn't say here, ma'am, just that they had an empty slot and you're being tapped to fill it." he shrugged. "Someone got promoted, someone else retired and they moved him up a slot as part of filling that hole, maybe somebody got in an air car accident. It could be any number of things"

"Well, I'll find out when I get there, I suppose." I shrugged. "Could you put in a request for me to take some leave at destination on top of transit time? My folks are in Nusku colony, and I haven't seen them in a couple years."

"Absolutely." he agreed, tapping the screen. "I can approve up to one week without even asking my officer... do you need more?"

"One week should be fine." I thanked him, and I collected the datachip with my orders from him and stepped aside to let the next person come up to the window.

So.... on top of everything else that was intolerably stalling me here, I was now being assigned for a routine entry-level tour on a system defense boat. They weren't even going to assign me to something that actually had a hyperdrive.

What the heck was even going on?

* * * * *

Despite all the insufferable aggravation of this experience, the opportunity to see my parents again did make the trip worth it - at least for a few days. I hadn't seen them since I'd originally left Plock to go to Public Service prep camp, and that had been almost two and a half years ago. And that was a damn long time, especially for a 20-year-old girl who hadn't ever lived away from home before graduating secondary-ed!

So I got the tearful reunion, and the home cooking, and the frankly embarassing amount of accolades from the folks at my scientfic accomplishments to date. I also got the surprising news that even now was on a ship heading for Terra in its jump-mail bag, that I'd crossed paths with on my way out to Nusku. By next spring, I was going to be a big sister.

My parents had always wanted a larger family than just me and Michal, but our troubled financial situation after the destruction of Warsaw and my older brother's death alongside our grandparents had meant that I'd grown up not only as the sole survivor but as an only child. What little 'cushion' they'd been able to save up after everything the family had lost in Warsaw would have been eroded to the bone by having to support even one more mouth to feed, so a third or fourth Nowak sibling had simply not been in the cards.

But that was then and this was now - my mom's promotion and transfer to Nusku had left her making twice as much as she'd been making on Terra, and with me grown up and out of the house my dad was now available for full-time work again. So the Nowaks were solidly middle-class and comfortable now, and would bid fair to be even more comfortable in the future, and so the decks were clear to finally start having the additional children that I'd known they'd wanted for basically my entire life.

"Well, that's silver lining number two for me being assigned to a system defense boat," I said amusedly. "There's zero chance we'll be jumped out to another star system, so I can rely on still being here when it's time to welcome little Piotr aboard."

"It's still odd that you got assigned there." Dad replied. "We know that your real potential has come to the attention of at least some senior people, so what do they think they're doing?"

"Best-case scenario, they think they've got time to wait and see what I can do on a schedule they can understand." I replied at least as much for the audience as for my folks, because now that I was on ONI's radar there was a nontrivial possibility this house was bugged. "And as much as it chafes my shorts to mark time like this, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong. As they see it the Confederation needs technological breakthroughs soon, but doesn't need them immediately. And while our R&D has been proceeding at a remarkable pace over the past generation by historical standards, you still haven't heard anything about teenaged supergeniuses revolutionizing the entire tech tree, have you?"

"No we haven't." Dad agreed. "So you're right, it's possible that they just aren't sure of how to handle someone like you and so are falling back on wait-and-see."

"Which I understand, but still doesn't mean I'm happy about waiting." I groused.

"Of course you aren't." Mom agreed - of course both of my folks knew about the possibility of eavesdroppers, that was one of the first things I'd discreetly whispered to them in the first safe location I'd found that would have been impractical to bug in advance without precognition. "I certainly remember hauling a certain young girl off of the roof several times in direct defiance of my 'no climbing' order, to name just one thing that comes to mind right now." she snarked. "So I'm assuming that you have a plan to try and get something done anyway."

"Actually, no." I groused. "My problem isn't just that I'm in the military and not in charge of my own anything, it's that I'm an ensign fresh out of OCS about to report aboard for her first shipboard assignment. Everyone is going to automatically presume I'm guilty of being an idiot, and I'm going to have to prove that I'm not before they'll begin to trust me to work unsupervised. Which means I'm not going to have any immediate opportunities to innovate anything. And that's on top of-" I trailed off.

"In any command, there's a whole ton of routine admin duties that require an officer to sign off on them but don't require any specifical professional expertise. And it's traditional to dump all those on the least senior one. And this is all on top of your regular assigned duties and watch-standing, of course." Dad agreed, speaking from his own Navy experience. "So even with a workaholic's schedule, even if they were willing to let you, you still woudln't really have any time for major projects. Not for your first six to twelve months there, at least."

"Agh!" I swore. "Everything is just... every step forward is just two steps back!" I burst out, and that one wasn't just a performance for the cameras.

"Well, if you don't have any options with your current toolkit, is there any way you can think of some new tools?" Dad asked as obliquely as he dared mention the Celestial Forge out loud.

I rubbed my chin in thought as I mentally opened the menu and went looking for anything that was useful for breaking my current deadlock. For the first time since I'd gotten the Forge I had enough accumulated CP to afford the 600-point options, not that I'd had any time to really get any use out of the Forge during the past six months of constant training...

... wait, what?

My jaw literally dropped as I saw one particular item on the list of 600cp options that I hadn't been able to access prior to accumulating enough points. Ragnarok Proofing (Battletech).

Battletech had started out as a late 20th-century miniatures wargame involving impractically large mecha fighting each other in a post-apocalyptic interstellar future. The only reason I knew of it is because the 21st-century computer games built on the franchise had gotten a brief revival when I was in primary-ed. Something about going out in a giant robot to stomp on other giant robots with giant laser guns still appealed, even in the 22nd century. But it hadn't been a very big revival, and were it not for my Forge-augmented memory I'd likely have never even brought to mind. I certainly wouldn't have recalled enough details from having played one of the computer games to know whyI absolutely had to buy this the instant it became available.

No, not for the Battlemechs. Even in-setting the only reason they'd been practical is because it had been in the script - the list of reasons why only pure Rule of Cool kept a similar investment of resources into building tanks or ground-attack aircraft should have let you kill any equivalent C-Bills' worth of Battlemtechs with the same tech base were legion. And while I looked forward to seeing if things like ferro-fibrous armor or endo steel were or could be made superior to modern-day composites, and our fusion plants were already more powerful (if nowhere near as robust or simple), and they didn't have contragravity, the purchase would have been worth all 600cp I'd put into it and more simply for one thing.

The Kearny-Fuchida jump drive had a range of thirty light-years in normal operation.

Thirty light-years was over nine parsecs. That was four and a half times the maximum range of the Vilani jump-2 drive.

I purchased the perk without hesitation and let the knowledge flow into my mind, and inwardly cursed. Yes, the K-F drive vastly outranged either Confederation or Vilani jump drive - but it also required much larger drives. The smallest JumpShip practical to build with Battletechnology was 2500 dtons in size... and that was a scout, the setting's equivalent to our Navy's 100 dton Crockett-class picket ship. The average size of a BT JumpShip was measured in hunrdeds of thousands of dtons. You could literally jump the collective tonnage of the entire 11th Fleet with one K-F drive, assuming you built a large enough JumpShip to fit all of 11th fleet's cruiser squadrons on the booms. Which might come in handy someday, but also meant that I'd have to convince someone to make an ungodly huge investment in prototype research just to prove this thing worked at all.

And that was before we got into how navigation was far more finicky with a K-F drive than contemporary jumpdrive. You could use jump-2 drive almost anywhere outside the 100-diameter limit of a celestial body. K-F drives couldn't enter or leave jumpspace except in very carefully calculated 'jump points' where all local gravitational influences cancelled themselves out to zero-

Wait. Local gravitational influences. The exact mechanisms by which the 100-D limit blocked our jumpdrive were not unknown, but the Battletech universe understood exactly how a K-F drive was interfered with by local gravity gradients. They could calculate such inteferences to an incredibly fine degree, and they had to be able to do that just to be able to plot jump points at all.

But the Battletech universe didn't have artificial gravity manipulation... and we did.

"Honey?" my dad asked, as I'd apparently been sitting and staring into infinity across the kitchen table for an indeterminate number of minutes.

"I think I have an idea." I massively understated.

* * * * *

"Status change!" I announced crisply as the icon of a new emissions source flared to life in my holodisplay tank, and I hurriedly interpreted the reading and mentally matched it against what I knew of Vilani systems. "New contact just went active! Contact is designated Bandit Two, identification... emissions signature matches Kargash-class cruiser, dex ninety-three light seconds, bearing zero-three-zero by plus zero-two-zero."

The CSS Gladstone was a 400-dton Bannerjee-class System Defense Boat. She was the size of a Gashidda-class Vilani "patrol cruiser" - or what we'd call a frigate - but had no FTL capacity at all. Instead, all of the internal volume not being used on a jumpdrive was reserved for the most powerful model of 6-G maneuver drive, advanced active and passive ECM, and oversized magazines for anti-ship missiles. They were the latest concept of Confederation attrition defense - intended to be heavily seeded in critical star systems to augment available fleet firepower with something that carried a punch out of its weight class. The normal crew complement was 8 officers - of which I was the most junior - 5 NCOs, and 22 enlisted ratings.

And we also had the endurance to operate alone for extended periods of time, provided we had a few prepositioned supply caches to replenish consumables and ammo from. So even if the Vilani overran the Nusku star system and took out the main fleet elements, all of the SDBs could 'go dark' in and then leap back out to attack vulnerable supply lines after the main fighting front had moved inwards towards Terra. A Bannerjee could lurk in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant, in the depths of a planetary ocean, or as a cold drifting rock in deep space or the asteroid belt, and had multiple laser turrets and six anti-ship missile launchers for both short and long-range engagements.

Just as we were doing right now, attempting to ambush a Vilani 800-dton fleet supply ship as it was leaving Nusku preparatory to jumping inward to catch up with the Vilani advance at Agrippa. Even despite the glaring icons of damaged and nonfunctional systems on our status panels and the reduced crew we were running with, the lightly-armed bulk carrier we'd been shadowing was still a sitting duck for us. But that was before 2000 dtons of Vilani fleet cruiser had suddenly introduced themselves. Right now we were outside his active sensor range, especially on silent running, and almost 150% outside his extreme missile range, but if he was on any one of several vectors then-

"Where the hell did he come from?" Ensign Gallery, eight entire months senior to me and currently serving as acting XO muttered disbelievingly from his adjacent panel.

"Engineering, bridge, cut the drive." Lt. Garcia ordered. "Rig for minimum emissions signature." He paused and continued more thoughtfully. "They are transiting an entire task force through Nusku after all, and he must be a straggler or a replacement who's stopping off here to refuel. And that's really bad luck for us. Nowak, what's Bandit Two's vector?" the lieutenant asked me. Right now Bandit Two was just a dot in our passive sensor array, trackable only by her own lidar emissions, so the only way to figure out which way she was actually travelling would be to wait for multiple readings to come in and then plot the rate of change in his bearing-

I hurriedly ran the plotting software while simultaneously doing the raw calcs in my head. "Bandit Two's vector is... two-five-zero by zero-zero-zero, and by the strength of his drive signature he's accelerating at six G's. He's doing a full-power burn, almost straight sideways across our bow."

"Sir, we can't engage this guy." Ensign Gallery said frankly. "He's five times our size, has almost twice our armor, and mounts forty-eight missile launchers to our six. I try a long-range duel with him, he maybe takes some damage from what little I can leak through his point defense while his first salvo blows us to particles. We lay low and drift in close to try it with beams, that ends even faster for us."

"I'm well aware of that. Mr. Gallery." Lt. Garcia said disgruntedly, as we stared and saw our chance to ambush and destroy a Vilani supply ship go up in smoke. Ever since the Vilani had overrun the Nusku system, the Gallery had been lurking in the asteroid belt living off of prepositioned supply caches and just waiting for a chance to fulfill our missions as a behind-the-lines raider, and now a Vilani strike cruiser just happens to sail right into our ambush... "Nowak, put our evasion options on the plot."

Normally the navigation work would be done by the assistant tactical officer - which was Gallery's usual slot - but with the bridge running on three junior officers instead of our normal five, I was doubling as ATO as well as EWO, just as Ensign Gallery was acting XO as well as tactical officer. So, that meant this part of the exercise was up to me, and my fingers flew over my keyboard as I invoked the hard laws of ballistic mathematics to solve the problem of 'If you're drifting this way at this vector, and Bandit Two is accelerating that way at that vector, what energy expenditure on your part could keep you outside of a circular volume of death called Bandit Two's detection range without making so much noise that he sees you anyway?'...

... and then I stopped as I came to a realization.

"Nowak, I need a course." Lt. Garcia said more firmly as I cleared my workstation's desktop and began frantically going through my sensor logs looking for something else... "What's the hold-up?" he prodded gently, as I sensed the silent ghost of the Skipper leaning forward to peer over my shoulder...

"Sonofabitch, that's a decoy." I swore out loud. "Sir, look at this." I hurriedly scrolled back through our recorded sensor logs back until I spotted what I was looking for about nine minutes ago, and highlighted a very minor squiggle that our passive array had recorded that only in detailed hindsight was visible as a missile deliberately trying a stealth launch. "See that? Bandit One loaded an ECM warhead onto a missile and kicked it off the rack as we were approaching, a burst launch with no initial acceleration while he used his own hull to mask the launcher from us. And then it drifted away on this vector using silent running before the timer expired, and it lit off the drive and headed back across our path while the ECM pod went active to simulate a Kargash's sensor suite. Bandit One spotted or suspected us drifting in, and he's trying to bluff us into running away."

"I'd love to believe that, but that's just one minor blip." Lt. Garcia said thoughtfully. "What makes you so certain?"

"Sir, Bandit Two is going six G's." I pointed out. "That's possible for a Kargash-class, but that would be a max-power burn for them just like it would be for us. The only reason a real Vilani fleet unit would be putting that kind of wear on the engines is if he'd already spotted us and was racing to cut us off - but if he has done that, then why is his intercept course all wrong? He's at least forty degrees off optimum vector, and that gives us all the room we need to duck behind him and avoid his missile envelope entirely. If he knew where we were then he'd never be making that kind of mistake, and if he was still searching for us then he should be flying a search pattern, not a sprint like that." I paused and continued more formally. "Contact Bandit Two re-evaluated as Vilani ECM drone. Recommend we proceed with the attack on Bandit One."

The universe paused for a second while Lt. Garcia silently made up his mind, to resume motion again at his words. "We stick with it. Helm, maintain course. Tactical, set up for launch on Bandit One as per the original plan."

"Aaaand, exercise concluded." Lt. Prescott, the Gladstone's real CO, said approvingly as she declared the simulation over and resumed her post. Lt. Mukume, our XO, entered the proper commands in his workstation and the 'Vilani-occupied' star system whose virtual reality was being fed into all of our bridge console displays blanked out to be replaced by the peaceful expanse of the real Nusku system and the sensor readings appropriate to the routine patrol we were currently drifting through. Of course the actual state of affairs around our ship was being fed to Lt. Mukumble's XO's console the entire time and he could blank out the simulation and have us resume our normal duty stations immediately in an emergency while the Skipper walked around monitoring our performance, but any ship's bridge could be repurposed for use as a simulator as easily as feeding the right program into the central computer. Which made keeping up with your training underway a lot easier than in it had been the old wet-navy days.

"That Vilani supply ship is dead in space, and has been ever since you saw through his attempt to bluff you out. Remember, people, your job isn't just to interpret your sensor readings and operate your targeting computers. Your job is to think about what you're actually looking at and figure out what it really means, not just whether the emissions you're picking up match something in the signature database or not. Good work, Nowak." the Skipper complimented me.

"Damn." my fellow ensign swore mildly. "Yeah, we all got skunked until you caught it at the last minute. But that was a pretty elaborate trick for a freighter captain, and our simulated opponent would have had to come up with it very quickly. I thought the Vilani didn't have that kind of imagination?"

"The Vilani culturally discourage innovation." Lt. Mukumbe said, "but never confuse that for them being stupid. The Vilani fleet has had thousands of years to work out the optimum tactics for what's in their naval toolkit via both trial-and-error and detailed analysis, and they have a very in-depth sense of institutional recordkeeping. The average Vilani captain isn't at all likely to throw his rulebook out and fly by instinct, but his rulebook is an entire library and after all the centuries they've spent adding to it there's already a page in it for damn near anything you can think of."

"So even if your Vilani opponent is going exactly by his book you're still not fighting a flowchart, you're fighting a chess-playing computer." I thought out loud. "Thousands and thousands of preset and precomputed positions to work from and a sophisticated heuristic algorithm analyzing and pruning them, even if the 'algorithm' is organic Vilani brains."

"And while the best chess-playing programs still can't quite beat the best human grandmasters, they do a very good job of kicking the average player's ass." the Skipper nodded. "Excellent analogy."

For all of my burning impatience to get into a position where I could actually start working on a refinement of the K-F drive, or anything else, I was surprised to find out that I was actually learning something useful here. In hindsight, trying to figure out what miraculous innovation(s) to build to help shift the tide of the next Interstellar War in favor of the Terrans would be enhanced by actually having some kind of familarity with space combat. But it wasn't until after I'd actually gotten onboard a warship and started training like a line officer that I began to realize just how helpful it could be. Because actually knowing how the weapons were used in the field was certainly a boost to a weapons designer.

Well, if I ever needed proof that my enhanced genius didn't include enhanced common sense, that would be it. I'd just have to work harder on taking care of that end of things on my own.

And I neither had I fully appreciated the usefulness of Bolthole Protocol at the time I'd purchased it, but I was pleasantly surprised at the sheer depth of things it could be used for. In addition to allowing you to reverse-engineer unknown technology it also vastly enhanced your ability to understand any known technology you worked with. As soon as I got my hands on a particular device or system I would start mastering the hows and whys at thousands of times normal speed, especially if I was also able to get a look inside at the guts of it. And that still worked for things that the Terran Confederation already understood how to build and operate, even if it was my first time actually playing with any of these. So I hadn't needed to be assigned to my new ship for more than a week before I had an in-depth understanding of its systems and technology on a level at least equalling that of her chief engineer's.

Since in theory the next Interstellar War could start without any warning at all - after all, it's not as if the Vilani had been polite enough to send a formal declaration of hostilies before starting the last three of those - like the ballistic missile submarines of the Cold War, the SDBs of Nusku Fleet operated on a patrol schedule of 60 days out and 30 days in-port. So after several weeks' of specialty training in electronic warfare - after all, I was already a rated sensor technician - I reported aboard my new ship just in time to start our next patrol cycle, and off we went.

Of course, it wasn't all valuable new learning experiences. Just as the one-time Petty Officer Nowak had predicted I was immediately buried up to my pretty pink armpits in routine administrative duties. I was just lucky that 'VD Control Officer' wasn't really a position that existed anymore, or else they'd have stuck me with that too. But even though I was hardly immune to boredom, my faultless memory meant that I never lost track of administrative details no matter how tedious I was, and it's not as if this paperwork was particularly mentally challenging if an ensign could do it.

Still, I really wanted to get to work. I'd been onboard the Gladstone only a few months by this point, but I was already starting to feel like I'd assimilated all educational value from the experience except the sorts of things that only actual field experienced could teach you. Not that an ensign could go browsing through the entire Command & General Staff training database or anything, but I'd already memorized anything I did have access to. And even the most junior officer still had to know the broad outlines of how their particular piece of the puzzle fitted into the overall strategic picture, especially on a warship that might have to operate independently of its squadron in extremis.

The basic defensive strategy of the Terran Confederation was rooted in the concept of "aggressive defense". The first two Interstellar Wars had not even attempted to conquer Terra, and the third had had the attempt be withdrawn by internal Vilani schism of some kind. The best the analysts could figure is that the Vilani political system or cultural outlook simply wasn't structured to permit lengthy, grueling campaigns of conquest. If it started to cost too much, they'd cut their losses.

Which struck me as just a wee bit of 'whistling in the dark', but hey, I wasn't the General Staff. And it had been how Terra had survived so far. But yes, the overall strategic outlook of the confederation is that the Navy would meet any Vilani attack as far out from Terra as possible, and blunt and harass it the entire way in. If we couldn't stop their initial incursion then the Navy would harass and delay the Vilani advance as much as possible without being forced into any large, set-piece battles in which they'd have the advantage. Meanwhile, behind-the-lines commerce raiders - or stranded system defense boats like us - would attack the haft of the Vilani spear rather than the tip, inflicting as much damage as possible on their support facilities and supply lines. As the battle line moved inwards, shortening our supply lines and lengthening theirs, eventually the Vilani attack would bog down and we'd resume the offensive until the force of our counterattack could win concessions - territorial or otherwise - from the Imperial government, at which point we'd accept a peace.

In other words, Terran lives would deliberately be traded for time until the Vilani finally got discouraged enough to quit. Which might have been the only practical way in which our tiny Confederation could actually survive unconquered by the vast Vilani Imperium, but was still a very grim outlook indeed. Men and ships would be lost, possibly even mass civilian casualties like the Siege of Terra had produced, and all to just resume the status quo ante - or possibly take just a little more territory to deepen our defensive depth, as we'd taken Nusku and Procyon - but the Imperium would still be there, still be largely intact, and still be able to try again in the future.

And they would, nigh-inevitably, try again in the future. For all that they seemed to lack the ability to politically commit to a long, drawn-out and expensive war, they seemed equally as culturally unable to just stop pushing. Every single Interstellar War to date had begun with a Vilani sneak attack. Even the First Interstellar War, the only one in which the Vilani might have been able to argue a legitimate casus belli by Terran standards, hadn't had a single Vilani diplomat so much as deliver a note to the Terran government asking for an apolog or indemnities before the Vilani Navy sailed into Barnard's Star and started shooting up the place. Terra had considered that sort of behavior to be 'rogue nation' territory at least since the beginning of our Industrial Age. Even in the First and Second World Wars, only the Imperial Japanese had commenced combat operations without at least presenting an ultimatum or a formal declaration of hostilities first, and even by the standards of that era had been looked at unfavorably for doing so. But going full Pearl Harbor about everything seemed to be the Vilani's default approach. So even when things were peaceful, like they were now, there was always that underlying tension beneath everything. Even the most optimistic analyses of the Confederation high command, the architects of our current 'peace dividend' type thinking, were still of the format 'we're pretty sure the Vilani won't attack again in this generation' and not 'we're pretty sure they'll never try it again'.

Which is why, in my copious free time, I'd been working as hard as I possibly could on the mathematics for a modified Kearny-Fuchida drive. One that kept the full range of the Battletech jumpdrive, all nine-plus parsecs of it, while incorporating the best features of Vilani jumpdrive to allow it all to be fitted into a smaller installation more compatible with current ship hulls. And one that would use our contragravity technology to 'shield' the K-F drive core in an artificially sustained bubble of completely neutral microgravity, so that the drive could be safely used anywhere outside of a strong gravity well, as with normal Vilani jumpdrive, instead of suffering the K-F drive's usual limitation of requiring a specific 'jump point' in the outer reaches of a solar system where all local gravitational influences were as evenly balanced as possible. Because I needed something I could show someone to actually get the funding and facilities necessary to try it out. After all, we were talking about building an entirely new class of starship and an entirely new version of jumpdrive here, and doing that would be a project comparable to the original StarLeaper One. I would need either official Confederation or megacorporate sponsorship of some kind to even begin to get the facilities.

But even if I couldn't do any work with hardware, and was stuck on an SDB patrolling the outer limits of the Nusku system besides, I could still do theoretical work on my perscomp. And the remote-learning facilities that the Confed Navy's Education Office could arrange to allow me to start Masters'-level corresponce courses in jumpdrive physics, as well as picking the brains of the Gladstone's chief engineer - after all, just beacuse we didn't have a jumpdrive on board didn't mean our Engineering officers hadn't worked on them before. Between that and the comprehensive knowledge that Ragnarok Proofing had given me all about K-F drive theory and physics, I hoped to be able to reconcile the two similar yet hardly identical designs and the different theories of jumpspace physics besides to come up with a unified approach that would let me hybridize the best features of both, or at least to fit K-F drive theory into the picture in a way mathematically compliant with the Vilani model. After all, even if the Forge was drawing upon multiple fictional (or other?) universes for my gifts of knowledge, I still only lived in one universe - this one.

Our first patrol cycle eventually completed without incident, and my new shipmates were suitably impressed at my being unusually not incompetent for an ensign. Between that and the part where they were generous with time off during your month planetside, given that you'd be spending the next two months locked in a pressurized can, I finally had enough time - and access to groundside libraries and computer support - to finish working out a tentative set of equations.

Which is why I was here, in civilian clothes and on shore leave and accompanying my mother to the main offices of the High Frontier Development Consortium. A recently-formed venture by billionaire industrialist Umar bin-Abdullah al-Ghazali, he'd dumped most of his billion-sol personal fortune into acquiring as many assets on Nusku as possible. We'd only taken it away from the Vilani at the end of the Third Interstellar War, and with their entire political and Vilani corporate leadership gone in the transition but all of the infrastructure and the billion-plus Vilani engarii and kimashargur that had been here were still here, and despite the obvious risks was still a rich and profitable field of expansion for Terran... entrepreneurs.

High Frontier had been chosen by me for two main reasons. First, I was trying to find someone who could fund a new jumpdrive research project, and High Frontier had taken over almost all of the Vilani-built shipyards and spacedocks that they'd left behind here, and were already one of the Confederation Navy's latest contractors for warship construction. And second, it was the only megacorporation where I already knew anyone who worked there.

And even if my mother was only a middle-management administrator at the starport, that meant she could at least still speak to someone senior at the starport. Who could then speak to someone senior at the corporate HQ, also here on Nusku. Who, given that I already had the reputation in scientific circles of having been a key part of the Peraspera terraforming breakthrough - a breakthrough that the Terran financial sector was also paying attention to now, given the future investment opportunities there - meant that dropping my name and a sincere entreaty of how 'my supergenius daughter thinks she has something else you'd be very interested in, but she got drafted into the Navy and they interrupted her research' meant that someone senior in High Frontier's shipbuilding division would actually be willing to give me an appointment.

And so, datachips filled with all my math and theoretical research notes in hand, I stepped into the office and sighed inwardly in relief that they'd actually taken my mom seriously enough to send not just an exec to talk to, but also a senior enough person from their R&D department to hopefully understand the math I was about to show them. After almost three years of traveling, training, and being drafted several times over, I'd finally gotten a chance to show someone a real live invention of my own and not just a refinement of existing work (or a nanotech terror weapon I destroyed before daring to so much as mention its existence to anyone else). And all I had to do was convince them that not only did a brand new Navy ensign who technically speaking couldn't even be legally working for anyone else yet and only had a bachelor's degree (so far!) really genuinely have the greatest scientific breakthrough of the age in the palm of her hand, but that it was worth believing her theories enough to authorize, oh, I'd guesstimate at least half a billion and change in research budget to let her try and prove it.

But even though the manipulative, uncommunicative nogdoodnik wouldn't even hint at what or why, the fact remained that the Forge had picked me for a reason. And it was about time that I got started on showing why it had made the right choice.

* * * * *

Author's Note: Giving birth to this chapter, metaphorically speaking, felt like trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a softball. But hey, I was well aware that my readers' patience could survive to showing only so much setup arc and that eventually we'd have to start building shit. So, here we are.

And no, you're not going to get Battlemechs stomping Vilani planets into rubble. Let me just dispel that expectation right now. Battlemechs are vastly impractical in any environment outside their native setting, and the only reason they're practical there is because for some reason people who are able to build things like exowombs, genetically-engineered supersoldiers, neurohelmets, and FTL drives still can't build any battlefield targeting system substantially more accurate than unstabilized guns firing over iron sights. Fuck's sake, a Russian tank can hit more often and at longer ranges while on the move than your average first-line Battlemech - at least they have laser range-finders, ballistic computers, and two-axis hydraulic main gun stabilization - let alone an Abrams.

But even if the Battletech setting makes vastly inefficient use of the parts in their toolkit, they have a veyr nice toolkit that meshes well with the Traveller setting. So, let's see what kind of uses we can find for those tools.

Plus, of course, the fact that K-F jumpdrive range (and also jumpdrive speed, as K-F jumps are, IIRC, instantaneous) is a major gamebreaker in the Traveller setting even out of the box.

Unspent CP: 200
Purchases: Ragnarok Proofing (Battletech)

cliffc999 · Dec 8, 2022

Labels were a two-edged sword.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sir?" I non-answered.

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

"No sir." I answered him forthrightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

Unspent CP: 0
Purchases: Black Computer (Lucy)

cliffc999 · Sep 18, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

In limited doses, at least.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dr. Nowak?" Admiral Davenport prompted me.

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

* * * * *

So, now what?

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

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

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

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

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

And then what?

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

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

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

* * * * *

Slightly under three years ago an eager young girl fresh out of secondary-ed had entered the orbital station of Armstrong Highport, taking her first steps out into a greater universe. And now she was back there again, only now her eager innocence had been replaced by a weary… resignation? I still wasn't sure what I was feeling, only that I wasn't really enjoying it.

"Greetings, Lieutenant Nowak." the computerized voice greeted me. I was standing in front of one of the many secure terminals lined up in the foyer of the personnel office of Armstrong Highport's naval section.

"Checking out on leave." I greeted it. Because of course you didn't start your leave time at your duty station, not when you were stationed in Ganymede orbit. Even at the best velocity possible for a milspec reactionless maneuver drive, the Jupiter-to-Earth run still took over sixty hours.

"I regretfully cannot comply, Lieutenant. There is a required administrative action to complete before your leave request can be finalized." the computer surprised me.

"Oh what now?" I whined, before taking a deep breath. "Query; what action, and by what authority?"

"The required action is to attend a personnel meeting at your earliest convenience in secure conference room R-42, and the originating authority is the Confederation Security Agency."

The CSA? I blinked in alarm. Why the heck did the Federation's chief domestic security and civilian counterintelligence service have a 'hold' out on me? My brain gibbered in a fractional second of alarm before common sense reasserted itself and reminded me that if there were actually an arrest warrant out on me, I would have stepped right off the interplanetary transport into a waiting squad of CSA agents or Military Police. So this must be something else, and while I could overheat my brain trying to guess at what it would be simpler to just go and let them tell me.

"Acknowledged. Tell them I'm on my way." I told the computer, and after a quick check of the compmap to get directions to the conference room I headed off to my meeting.

"Dr. Nowak?" I was greeted by a dark-haired Oriental woman over fifteen centimeters taller than I was, which put her almost six centimeters over average female height. She was what even my relentlessly heterosexual self immediately noted as an unusually beautiful woman, with striking angular features and the build of a fitness model, and her English was almost perfectly accentless. "Special Agent Mira Song, CSA." she introduced herself with a smile. Before I could even ask she withdrew her credentials from her pocket and showed them to me. I idly noted that according to her badge she was actually a Senior Special Agent, which given that she looked to only be a few years older than I was told me that someone either had one of those faces that kept looking like a twentysomething even into her thirties or that she was fast-tracking just a bit.

This was a conference room, not an interrogation chamber, so I simply took a seat at one corner of the small table and she did likewise. After verifying her ID through the computer terminal on the table, I asked the obvious question. "May I ask what the CSA needs to speak to me about?"

Her brow furrowed slightly. "You weren't informed of my new assignment?" she asked, mildly concerned.

"New assign-?" I momentarily wondered why the heck a CSA agent would need me to be notified of her being assigned anywhere, until my augmented brain cross-referenced the only probable explanation. "Wait, I'm getting a protective detail?"

"Yes, and clearly there was some type of communication error if they didn't already brief you about that before you departed the Skunk Works." She nodded. "I'll get a copy of the briefing packet to you as soon as I can, but to summarize? It's not publicly advertised but there are protocols for the CSA's Protective Mission to cover people who are deemed uniquely valuable to the Federation even if they would not normally fall into one of the categories that we're assigned to."

"Such as high Confederation officials and their families." I acknowledged, as several minor oddities of the past couple of days dropped into place. "So that's why my ride in from Ganymede was on a system defense boat instead of a cargo shuttle. At the time I'd just thought it was the first space-available, but…" I trailed off knowingly.

"You're currently in the second-highest protective category we have." Agent Song acknowledged. "And you'd be in the first-highest except that the logistical requirements of that one would make it publicly obvious that you are one of our protectees now, and drawing any further attention to you than you might already have is the last thing we want to do. So for as long as the threat board remains clear your detail will be only one agent – me – as opposed to surrounding you with squads of people."

I rubbed my chin thoughtfully. "If there's only one of you then you can't be expected to guard me against any serious attack. You're a deterrence against casual danger only, yes?"

"Correct." She nodded. "But primarily I'm going to be a walking panic-button. While we can't surround you with a squad without telling anyone who looks that you're a high-value target, in the event of any emergency we still want to cut response times to the minimum possible. So I'm your full-time shadow from now on, and I'll be wired up 24/7 with the best secure comms the Confederation can supply… at least until you invent some new ones?" she finished with a disarming chuckle.

"Public transport?" I asked, having already grasped the significance of them not allowing me to do even an interplanetary shuttle run in Terra's home system without making me ride on a heavily armed and armored military starship.

"If the threat board is clear, allowable – making you take an armored airlimo everywhere also draws attention." She said agreeably. "And anything short of surrounding you with full head-of-state level precautions is already a trade-off of security versus logistics, the only question is exactly where the trade-off is. So we're going to start as discreetly as possible and only ramp up when the threat level increases."

"You said 'when', not 'if'." I noted softly.

"Doctor, while we will of course do everything possible to delay the revelation for as long as possible, eventually the Vilani are going to figure out that the Confederation's military R&D has recruited a new game-breaker… and when they finally do, then yes." she acknowledged soberly. "At that point their attempts to kill you will almost certainly be a 'when', not an 'if'."

We let that one just sit on the table for a long silent moment, before I nodded. "Well, if I couldn't take a joke then I shouldn't have gotten drafted." I eventually acknowledged, with a meaningful wave of my hand down at my Navy uniform.

"We all do our part." she acknowledged. "But the good news is, I'm not here to tell you you're not allowed to go on vacation. I'm just here to make sure you get back from it. So let me just cover a couple more of the most essential topics as quickly as I can. First off, while they obviously missed the boat on getting these to you at Ganymede I was also given a copy of your orders for my own information, so I can give them to you." She took out her perscomp and plugged in a datacable, and I withdrew my own Black Computer, currently disguised as a perscomp of my own, and quickly read through the file she sent.

It was a formal set of written orders from a Vice Admiral Young, and my eyebrows raised in shock as my eidetic memory informed me that he was currently assigned as the Director of Naval Intelligence. According to these orders I was, with the concurrence of the Department of the Navy, officially placed in Protective Category Two-Alpha (Special) underneath the supervision of the CSA with all applicable regulations and restrictions thereto, along with several specific endorsements and clarifications.

"To translate that into plain English, the reason you're being bodyguarded by me instead of, oh, a Marine special operations detail – in addition to the fact that executive protection is what my department specializes in - is precisely so that the military chain of command doesn't get involved here." Agent Song nodded. "I'm not your superior officer and I can't give you orders, except to the extent that my position as a CSA agent would allow me to give orders to a civilian. Likewise, you don't outrank me and can't give me orders, although obviously part of any protective detail assignment is to comply with the reasonable requests of the protectee as much as possible. We're bodyguards, not corrections officers." The corner of her mouth quirked. "Also, the fastest way for bodyguards to have to deal with their protectees trying to escape from them is to act like they're someone that needs to be escaped from, and that's been true since back to when people in my career slot were still armed with shields and spears."

"I'm already guessing that part of the 'reasonable restrictions' is that I have to clear my itinerary with you in advance, so you can do things like alert the local field office that a high-value protectee will be in the area so they can keep a reaction squad ready to go if you call them." I nodded. "Also so that you can veto any particular no-go zones."

"But I'll try to be as accommodating as possible on that one." She reassured me. "As I said, the more I act like a jailer the more you'll just try to get away from me, and I can't do my job effectively unless you want me to do it. That having been said, yes, if you had a burning desire to go hit the beach in, oh, the West African conflict zone, then we'd definitely not be clearing you for that."

"I wasn't even sure where I was going to go." I admitted with an exasperated wave of my hands. "I just knew I was going to go stir-crazy if I didn't get back groundside for a while."

"Not surprising." She surprised me with a nod. "According to your file, you've barely had two weeks of real downtime in three years. Between Peraspera, your carrying an almost double course-load at MIT, and then your Navy deployments-" She waved her hand. "Of course you're feeling a little out of sorts, you've barely had a chance to stop and breathe since you've taken your CATs and your life has undergone multiple paradigm shifts in that time."

"Your degree's in psychology, isn't it?" I gave her a knowing side-eye.

"It is." She acknowledged immediately. "That's actually quite common for law enforcement – no matter what technology does, the biggest part of our job is still the human element."

I politely didn't mention that my new bodyguard wasn't even pretending to not also be my minder, given that she herself was trying to at least pretend to be polite about it. Still, though-

"Ever been off-planet?" I asked her.

"Not recently." she said. "But I did take a refresher on basic vacc suit and space emergency procedures when I got this assignment."

"Because when I go back to Ganymede – or wherever else the Navy sends me – you'll have to follow me." I admitted. "But the reason I asked is, I haven't been on Terra since they shipped me out to Nusku, and even that was a pretty brief stop. So, what's the current hot vacation spot on the motherworld?"

"That depends. What are you interested in?" she smiled at me.

* * * * *

"So, do you think it's everything it's cracked up to be?" Agent Song asked me as she cheerfully waved her non-alcoholic cocktail around at the venue.

It was a sunny afternoon and we were seated outdoors at a café table on the French Riviera, eating the sort of 'If you have to ask, you can't afford it' lunch I'd never have dreamed of seeing in my life several years ago. We'd come here largely on her recommendation, because she'd been stationed here for almost a year – as one of the most prestigious 'rich people' vacation spots on Earth, there was a permanent CSA station kept here to augment the individual protective details of the sorts of high officials who came here. Even if she'd never have been able to afford the prices here without my new multi-millionaire wallet being opened to accommodate us both.

"It's… certainly not my usual experience." I agreed. My new minder and I were both dressed in expensive fashions, newly-bought at the stores here, because the entire point was to look like two young women on vacation as opposed to a Navy officer and her government-issue bodyguard. Although she could have paid for her own outfit – apparently I was considered VIP enough that my bodyguard was authorized a generous expense account – the ultracapacitor royalties made me more than flush enough to just buy them for her. Besides, I was still trying to work out exactly where the boundaries were with my new mandatory companion and I wasn't going to do that without pushing her comfort zone a little. So far my probes hadn't discovered anything except that she was an exceptionally patient woman who was very skilled at keeping a conversation from devolving anywhere unpleasant without making it look like she was pushing you anywhere. I mentally added a few more data points to my mental tally of 'is she my minder, or my handler?' and kept on keeping on.

"I still wish I'd been able to convince you to hit the concert venue instead." she said jokingly.

"Synthpop's not really my thing, thanks." I nodded. "Besides, the idea of standing in the middle of a crowd of screaming people waving a glowstick makes me twitch at the sheer thought of that much sensory overload."

"Are you on the autism spectrum?" she asked me politely. "Because that wasn't in your file."

"Sometimes I've wondered." I admitted honestly. "But no, I doubt it. They gave me the brainscan in primary-ed just to make sure, after my fourth time in the principal's office for 'discplinary incidents'. I just don't like crowds."

"Not going to lie, a protectee whose record shows that she had a consistent problem with getting herself punched in the face is not considered a fun time in the protective detail." She said. "But at least you haven't had any such incidents since Peraspera."

"Oh trust me, I almost threw down a couple times at MIT. College kids are jerks." I let slip, and then cursed that last cocktail I'd had with lunch. "But… are you familiar with Heinlein's saying on the topic of maturity?"

'It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.' she quoted with a soft laugh.

"Yeah." I nodded. "It just doesn't seem worth the effort nowadays."

"Degree or no, it's bad form to try and diagnose anyone you haven't clinically examined." she nodded soberly. "But while the past week of beach and socialize has definitely relaxed you, you still seem a little stressed."

I ate another spoonful of my dessert in lieu of an answer, while I tried yet again to figure out what was wrong with me.

"If you don't want to talk about it, don't." she nodded. "But if you do, I'm not the judgemental type."

"Sometimes I feel like a fraud." I said softly. "Which is a stupid thing to feel for someone who's… invented the things I've invented." I censored myself in public.

"No it's not." She surprised me with her ready agreement.

"Excuse me?" I looked at her, more than a bit taken aback.

"Sorry, that came out wrong." She apologized. "I'm not saying I think your evaluation of yourself is justified, because you're right, it's not. Just from what you've achieved so far you're one of the most uniquely brilliant people in history, let alone contemporary times. What I am saying is that logical or not, your feelings are still valid. They are emotions you are genuinely dealing with, reactions you're having to the life experience that you've actually lived, and whether logical or not they still have genuine weight that you have to learn how to carry. Or to shed."

"You know, I've been a good girl so far and not actually hacked your personnel record yet, but you are making it really tempting." I retorted.

"If you're asking whether I'm acquainted with the 'advanced aptitude tracking' committee, then yes." She nodded. "But not the way you're thinking. They didn't assign me here, and I don't report to them."

"Then how do you know-?" I snapped my fingers at how stupid I was being. "You were National Honors too, weren't you?"

"Missed it by two." she replied. "But yes, I was one of the very top students in all of Korea in my year, and I was also a champion athlete, and a dancer, and a couple of other things. So I was the sort of high-functioning polymath that got fast-tracked through a carefully-curated Public Service just like you were, only through different categories."

"How'd you end up in the CSA?" I asked her.

"Sometimes I still wonder!" she chuckled. "I originally wanted to be an idol singer, would you believe? My plan was to just get through my mandatory Public Service tour, then straight back to the entertainment industry I'd already been training for as far back as secondary-ed. Except instead of what I applied for I ended up as support staff for a Frontier Constabulary outpost on Nusku, and that's what got me interested in police work. So psych degree in college with early graduation, then the CSA academy, and it was off to the races."

"Have you ever wished you were born in pre-Confederation times?" I risked asking.

"You mean back before we knew we were all under existential threat by an enormously larger alien imperium and had to reorganize all of human society on a permanent war economy?" she agreed. "Yeah. Sometimes." she reluctantly admitted.

"I wish it need not have happened in my time." I quoted Frodo.

"So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." she quoted Gandalf in reply.

"Is it okay if I call you Mira from now on?" I asked slowly.

"Only if I get to call you Sophia." she smiled.

For the first time since Peraspera, I started to feel not quite so alone.

* * * * *

Author's Note: It lives!

Well, provisionally lives. I still have no story outline for what comes next, I'm still gonna have to wing it, and I'm still struggling to make a viable Celestial Forge fic because I've never gotten one really through the empire-building stage yet, that's where I always choke. But I am at least going to try this one again, because I really did like it. So no guarantees, but we'll see how far I can get this time.

And I did have the one inspiration of 'Hey, you know what Sophia needs? Another character to bounce off of.' And so the Confederation is reacting to their new supergenius by going 'Hey, Dr. Quest, we're assigning you your own Race Bannon because we really don't want you getting mugged to death by some rando in an alleyway', and so Special Agent Song joins the team.

No, she's not based on a certain character from K-Pop Demon Hunters, despite the name. She was very very loosely inspired by, but outside of the first name and a national origin and a love for k-pop (or 'synthpop' as it's called in the 22nd century), not much else.

Also, as this is QQ, I need to clarify straight-up – no, they're not going to be shipped. Neither of them even has that orientation. *g*

Unspent CP: 1000
Purchases: PhDs (Fantastic Four)

cliffc999 · Sep 20, 2025

Transhuman Protocols (Generic Cyberpunk) cost me 600cp, but it was worth every point.

As the perk description said, "You can take any technology or procedure that you understand and easily figure out the flaws, pitfalls, drawbacks, and unintended or negative consequences, and as long as you put in the time you'll figure out how to get past them." So I'd immediately purchased this as soon as I saw it available on the menu. The last thing I wanted was to have one of my inventions catastrophically fail because I'd dropped a decimal point while trying to turn Forge-granted theory into actual practice. As anybody in the military knew well, one thousand 'attaboys' didn't outweigh one 'aw shit'. My reputation as the Confederation's latest miracle-worker would only last so long as I kept successfully producing, after all. And while I wasn't that massively invested in my own ego I was also entirely aware that the Powers That Be would only treat me as valuable so long as I actually remained valuable to them, and I kinda needed that status to keep myself in a position where people would actually listen to me.

Despite my hopes the perk didn't give me any ability to predict the social consequences of my inventions, though. Trying to apply Transhuman Protocols to calculating the direct and indirect fallout of FTL comms or the ultracapacitor gave me nothing that I couldn't have figured out on my own. It was a perk for infallibly spotting any hidden flaws or side effects in my engineering designs and nothing more. Which was still awesome, of course, but a girl had hoped.

In the less technical category of potential problems, I hadn't missed the possible significance of Mira's assignment to me. Now, the timing actually did line up with a simple 'As soon as your FTL comms project looked like it was actually going to work the highest-ups quite logically decided that your brain was one of the highest-priority strategic assets they had and so are taking extra precautions to make sure nobody cracks open your skull. ' The several months I'd taken to go from initial submission to first successful field test would be more than long enough for them to finish sifting through all their personnel files to find the ideal candidate and then brief and prepare her for her new assignment, particularly since they could change their minds at any point right up to the last minute. And as soon as the field test succeeded and they knew that my potential was not vaporware, that would lock Mira in as my new full-time companion. Occam's Razor was that in the absence of substantial evidence to the contrary the likeliest hypothesis was the one that required the smallest number of assumptions.

But it was of course also possible that there was a more sinister purpose to my suddenly being assigned a full-time minder who was also a highly-trained agent with advanced psychological training, and it didn't take a supergenius to guess at the possibilities. For that matter, even if Mira hadn't been intended to primarily be a full-time loyalty monitor on me she'd still effectively serve that function anyway. Regardless of whether or not she was routinely filing reports on my behavior upward, she'd still obviously be around and be observing my behavior herself. She couldn't possibly function as a bodyguard if she wasn't aware of where I was and what I was doing at all times, after all. And as a loyal agent she wouldn't hesitate to file a report up the chain if she ever did notice me doing anything suspicious, even if her primary purpose in being here wasn't actually to watch for such things. After all, the police didn't need to be specifically laying a speed trap in order to cite you for a traffic violation, simply driving recklessly in the line-of-sight of any officer not immediately busy with something else could guarantee that.

I was just self-aware enough to realize that I hadn't realized how lonely I'd been until I actually had someone to talk to that wasn't a co-worker or someone else I could keep at a professional distance. Because while Mira and I technically only had a professional association, that didn't hold up when you were full-time roommates with someone and they were that good at being easy to talk to without ever being over-familiar. Maybe that was an outgrowth of having spent her adolescent years training to be an entertainment idol, but I could readily see why they'd assigned her to the VIP bodyguard detail. So after a few days of waiting and seeing I decided heck with it, might as well try to be friends. Whether she was sucker bait or not, it would still only make a bad situation worse if I spent the next however many months or years living full-time with someone I couldn't get along with.

It still took a distinct act of willpower on my part to avoid succumbing to temptation and hacking Mira's personnel record anyway. And the main thing that held me back there was the awareness that my doing that would be such an obvious move to guess in advance that the relevant files would very likely be staked out to hell and gone, if not moved to secure offline storage only and replaced with honeypots. However, while the CSA could potentially do that with their own personnel files hacking the entire public datanet would be a bit less practical for them to manage, and it only took me about an hour to code a semi-intelligent dataminer program that my Black Computer spent a day or so quietly running as a background process. A dataminer that by the time it was done had pulled essentially everything available about Mira from non-secure datanet records, and then cross-referenced it all to see if any of it showed signs of having been 'adjusted' after the fact.

Mira Song had been born November 19, 2142, in the city of Daegu in the Republic of Korea. After the reunification of North and South Korea shortly before the turn of the century it had taken almost half a century to finish reintegrating the economically-devastated northern half of the country, but by now Korea had rebuilt itself into being almost the same industrial and economic powerhouse that it had been pre-unification. Like myself both of her parents were still alive, although unlike me she also had a thriving extended family – then again, nobody had nuked her hometown in the Third Interstellar War. Her father was a mid-level executive in a gravcar manufacturing company and her mother had been a minor actress in Korean TV prior to her marriage – it was pretty obvious which side of the family she'd gotten her looks from. She had one older brother who worked as an analyst in an investment bank and a younger sister still in college.

My eyebrows raised when I saw her CAT scores and educational transcripts. If she'd missed National Honors by two places then the Korean school system must have really been feeding those kids something, because her scores would have put her in first place for Poland at any point in the past six years (with one obvious exception). Her tested IQ was 140, or five full points higher than I'd been prior to my augmentation by the Forge. She also had total recall, and unlike me she'd been born with it. On top of that she had a very impressive list of extracurriculars including performing arts and dance as well as academic achievements, a junior martial arts championship, and even several minor entertainment credits prior to graduating secondary-ed. She'd blown through her Public Service tour in a double-credit assignment just like I had, and had completed enough educational credits while still on Public Service that she'd needed less than eighteen months post-Service to finish her bachelor's degree. Her degree was in psych, just like she'd told me, and her educational transcript showed that she was very much a liberal arts and social sciences type, not a hard science type. Then again, I was already surrounded by and supervised by more than enough genius scientists at the Skunk Works, so if Mira were intended to be an observer on me then it only made sense to have her concentrate on observing those parts of my life that weren't already heavily supervised. According to the public-facing portion of her CSA bio she'd started with them barely older than I was now, and had been promoted to Senior Special Agent… hmm, only a couple of months before being assigned to my case.

The suspicious part of my hindbrain started whispering again as I wondered how someone who'd racked up this kind of first impression and gotten noticed by the Genius Patrol ended up as a bodyguard, when one of the first places I'd have assigned someone like this if I were the CSA was undercover ops or counter-espionage. Of course, for all I knew they actually had done that. Her CSA personnel file was not available to public datanet searches, so unless I actually did want to hack their secure files I had to take her word for it that VIP protection details had been her regular career slot instead of something she'd just been switched to recently.

Or it could have just been an outgrowth of what Captain Jiang had explained to me when I'd originally gotten my assignment to the Skunk Works – that the Genius Patrol could only nudge the careers of their little prodigies, not dictate them, and that sometimes the square pegs still ended up jamming into the round holes all by their stubborn little selves. Or, like in my case, that they'd gotten misclassified. The Confederation had a total population of fourteen billion, after all, and even with skimming only the very top of a fraction of one percent that was still thousands and thousands of cases all being managed by one office full of people. That was the annoying thing about this sort of analysis – there was always a possible explanation that wasn't suspicious, and sometimes that explanation was even correct.

At any rate, this was my new at least mostly-permanent fixture in my life now, so I had to learn to get along with her – and she with me. And so far that process was going notably more smoothly than I would have anticipated given my prior life experiences, and I didn't think that was all due to them picking someone who was very skilled at getting along with people. In hindsight, the gap in my social skills that had led to my getting my face punched in repeatedly as a kid was that I'd somehow entirely missed the boat on learning how to deal with people who weren't as smart as I was – correction, as smart as I had been. Because on looking back every crash-and-burn I'd had was when dealing with people who did dumb things for dumb reasons, like that 'it totally won't hurt anything if I deliberately hide my claustrophobia and then get myself assigned to a pressure-sealed habitat!' idiot David back on Peraspera, while every relationship I'd had that ran smoothly had been with intelligent and/or well-disciplined people.

This… was not an entirely comfortable thing to realize about oneself after one had become superhumanly intelligent. Particularly not because at present the entire human race was composed of people substantially dumber than I was and I really needed to not let that get to my head. Still, for all that it had taken me longer than I should have to figure this out at least I eventually did figure it out, and that meant I could finally start working on it. And at least Mira would be a useful sort of person to pick up those kinds of social skills from… hopefully.

* * * * *

All good things eventually came to an end, including vacations. Mira and I had ended up hitting several of the hotspots on Earth – after a short week on the Riviera getting to know each other we'd loosened up enough to do things like a tropical beach weekend in the Bahamas, a quick tour of several of the more geographically breathtaking tourist attractions in North America, and even a brief visit to an orbital casino (brief because we got politely uninvited on the first evening for counting cards – Mira could have gotten us out of that by showing her badge, of course, but we'd decided not to). We closed out my several weeks of leave with a visit to the Tranquility Monument on Luna, paying a homage to mankind's very first footprint on another world, and then it was time to head back to Ganymede.

"Do you even check your com?" Dr. Wilson, one of my co-workers in FTL research, frustratedly greeted me almost immediately after check in.

"When I'm on leave? Not only no, but hell no." I replied firmly. "If there were an official priority then they had my override code, but I seriously needed to get out of the lab for a while before my brain melted."

"Fair." He acknowledged. "The comms project really was a sprint to the finish line, wasn't it? But even so, you missed a big breakthrough!" He chuckled. "And I mean, 'your guaranteed shot at the Nobel Prize isn't quite so guaranteed anymore' big, even if your project will probably be declassified first before Dr. Saunders' is."

"Saunders came up with something that big in the few weeks while I've been out?" I blinked. "What the heck did he do, invent jump-3?" I scoffed, before my jaw dropped at the expression on Wilson's face. "… he didn't."

"He did!" Wilson laughed. "It's still only theoretical, but-"

"Holy shit." I facepalmed, as I realized almost immediately what must have happened. "I overlooked a corollary in my equations that big?"

"You did." He said. "The same jumpspace quirk that lets the FTL comms work opened up an entire new category in jumpdrive theoretics. It just took a while to spot it-"

I let Wilson's brief summary of the math involved wash over my consciousness as I tried my best to analyze my own emotional reactions to this. Because I hadn't 'overlooked a corollary', of course – the Battletech jumpdrive theory that had let me reproduce the 'Black Box' FTL comms was of course the same that led to the Kearny-Fuchida drive and it's jump-9 capability, as well as it's far more quick – nigh-instantaneous, actually – time spent in jumpspace per jump, as opposed to the Vilani drive's 168-hour jump duration. I just hadn't told anyone about that part yet, on the theory that I'd look much more plausible to people if I rolled it out gradually instead of blatantly advertising I'd had a supernatural knowledge dump downloaded into my head all at once.

And that had left open a window of opportunity for Dr. Saunders, who was legitimately humanity's greatest jump-space physicist since McAndrew herself, to independently spot the possibilities in the math and start developing them himself. Not that he'd successfully reproduced the entire body of work all in just the barely a month I'd been gone, but he'd found the key insight entirely on his own and had convinced the Strategy Board he was on the right track. So despite my having come up with one of the greatest inventions in human history barely the month before, I'd just been knocked right back to second place regarding research priority around here… because of course the ability to go past the jump-2 barrier was the single greatest strategic advantage humanity could conceivably hope to obtain on the Vilani.

With a jump-3 or greater drive humanity would no longer be restricted to the astrographic spacelanes that the Vilani Imperium ran on, but instead be able to shortcut right across interstellar voids on the starmap that the Vilani couldn't hope to get past. For just one example, at jump-2 it took eighteen jumps to go from Terra to the \capital of the Vilani Imperial Rim Province at Shulgiasu. There were several long dog-legs around the starmap that were forced by the inability of a jump-2 drive to go no more than 2 parsecs between jumps. But Shulgiasu was a mere six parsecs away from Nusku in a straight line. The only reason it took fifteen jumps from Nusku to Shulgiasu was due to the 3-parsec gap between Shulgiasu and Lagash, a gap that a Vilani jump-2 drive couldn't hope to cross. With jump-3, you could do the direct run from Nusku in just two jumps. A Vilani courier chain doing an absolute minimum-time run with relays at each stop would take four and a half months, and a battle fleet – which needed to do things like fuel stops and maintenance layovers - approximately six months to cover the same distance. Meanwhile, the entire Confederation Navy could do the same run in reverse in a single month, without needing any more delay along the route than a few hours' fuel skimming at each waypoint. If we had the jump-3 drive in full deployment before the Vilani knew about it, then a hypothetical Fourth Interstellar War could be over before the current Saarpuhi Kushuggi had even finished catching up to the awareness that she was in one.

"Christ." I breathed heavily, as a portion of my brain noted Mira turning almost as pale as I felt. "That changes… everything."

"Should you even be telling us?" Mira asked him. "Because if anything would be 'Kill Yourself Before Reading' secret, this would!"

"Dr. Nowak's part of the FTL project, so she's cleared." Wilson said. "And you're cleared for everything she is, of course. I made sure to check in with that before I came to tell you."

"Mira's right, though. FTL comms were bad enough, but if the Vilani even suspect that this exists then we run a significant risk of getting the Fourth Interstellar War right up our ass before we could do more than finish testing the initial prototype. It'd be the only logical move in their position." I analyzed.

"The Advisory Board is still pondering the implications, yes." Dr. Wilson agreed. "Until then this is of course going to be kept blacker than a gravitational singularity at midnight. We're not even going to start hardware experiments until after the Council approves it, until then it's strictly theory only – and even that only in air-gapped stand-alone computers."

"Hell, if I were the Board I wouldn't even have the experiments done here. Should I start packing for a trip to Area 52?" I thought out loud.

"When the hardware phase starts? Probably." Wilson nodded. "Assuming they don't come up with an even more secret extrasolar location."

"Yeah. Well, I definitely need to go finish checking in with the Admiral, and then go make my congratulations to Dr. Saunders." I finished making my pleasantries with Wilson, and then we moved off to do just that.

By the time I'd finished getting back on the clock and my initial skim of Saunders' precis, I'd surprised myself by deciding that I was going to do absolutely nothing to disturb his momentum here. Things like jump-9, the Kearny-Fuchida drive, and all the rest of it were just going to stay in the box until and unless someone else found them.

Part of this was for rational motives – while I certainly didn't want to dawdle, neither did I want to push the pace entirely as fast as I could have. The 'Genius Patrol' was already suspecting that my intelligence was some kind of supernatural event, and I'd almost certainly gotten stuck with a full-time observer at least partly because of that suspicion. The last thing I needed to do was massively spook people even further, the bars of the golden cage were already starting to be set a little more closely together than I'd like. Furthermore, as all parties involved had already realized there was a distinct danger of provoking a Vilani reaction with a too-large or too-obvious change to the strategic stalemate, the last thing anyone needed done with those potentially smoldering embers was for me to dump yet another tanker truck of petroleum distillates on top of them. Allowing the plus-jumpdrive research to follow a natural progression that someone else – someone non-Forge-augmented – had started instead of forcibly pre-empting the whole thing for myself was a valid way to help avoid that problem. Both our social adjustments and theirs had a better chance of going non-catastrophically if they were allowed to set their own pace.

And I'd already achieved successful completion of the original mission the Forge had assigned me with the invention of FTL communication, so the time crunch should no longer be quite as urgent. I'd needed to rush out my first military significant invention to head off a prophesied defeated in the next Interstellar War, but having done that it now made sense to let that war start as late as possible, so Terra would have the maximum opportunity to translate our new research into new practical achievements – and fleets.

But I wasn't kidding myself. While I did have rational motives backing up my decision, or else I wouldn't have made it, the primary impulse behind my decision had been emotional. I'd already been feeling guilty about 'cheating' with the Forge – about how my mere existence was upstaging and obsoleting the life's work of multiple highly dedicated people who had earned every bit of ability and knowledge they possessed, as opposed to my pulling a cosmic lottery ticket. And so with the opportunity to avoid at least a little bit of my imposter syndrome by refusing to step on Dr. Saunders' win here, nothing short of obvious and immediate disaster if I chose that option was going to keep me from taking that option.

But Mira had been right – even if my emotions weren't always strictly logical, they were still real. And I still had every right to feel them, and to deal with them in my own way, so long as I wasn't massively screwing things up in the process. Which so far I wasn't, and if my decision later turned out to be a dumb idea then I could course-correct then. So for now, I was going to step back and follow rather than lead… at least until I could see where else I could usefully contribute. There was a whole universe out there of science to still be doing after all.

And I hadn't accepted the Forge for glory or for money in the first place. I'd done that to help save my home from the Vilani threat. And I was still doing that, even if not entirely in the way I'd first anticipated.

Besides, it was better if I didn't have to do that all alone.

* * * * *

Ironically, I'd barely had time to unpack my bags on Ganymede before it was time to head back to Terra again. Only this time it wasn't for a vacation, but instead for Dr. Saunders and I to conduct an ultra-classified briefing for the highest echelons of the Confederation government.

The Advisory Board was the highest ruling authority of the Confederation government. They selected the Secretary-General, they wrote most of the Confederation's laws, and if they passed a proviso with a two-thirds majority then that law was ratified without even needing a General Assembly vote. Likewise, the Advisory Board could veto any legislation proposed and passed by the General Assembly with a simple majority vote. Like the UN Security Council that the Advisory Board had replaced, there were five member nations whose representatives were permanently on the Board while the remaining two seats rotated at random through representatives chosen from the General Assembly at large. Although given that the 'Big Five' nations – the United States, China, the European Union, India, and Japan – had two members each, with only two out of twelve seats held open for the rotating representatives, it was readily apparent that Confederation policy could be almost entirely dominated by the Big Five so long as any four of them agreed on any particular initiative.

And it was these twelve people, as well as the Secretary-General, that we'd both be appearing to testify in front of, in the most tightly-sealed of secret sessions.

Rear Admiral Davenport of course accompanied us as the commanding officer of the Skunk Works, as well as helping us polish our presentations and doing as much of the talking to the bigwigs as possible. I also leaned heavily on Mira's advice on how not to embarrass myself in front of this kind of audience while still being taken seriously instead of being written off as a precocious kid, even if this was a bit above the circles even she'd VIP guarded. I also added a mental counter to the 'not a setup' tally when Dr. Saunders was greeted on our arrival on Terra by Senior Special Agent Connors, a hulking man-mountain of an ex-commando type who was his newly-assigned protective detail given that the jump-3 breakthrough had just put him into Special Category Two-Alpha the same as the FTL comms breakthrough had done for me.

I did several sleepless nights of crash-coursing myself through things like interstellar economics and fleet logistics, to back up the wide range of general knowledge I already had via Well-Researched, so I could start offering opinions slightly outside the range of questions I'd been asked and hopefully head off any obvious stupidity that the politicos might come up with. Although apparently the primary purpose of these meetings were not to make any serious strategic decisions now – the redrawing of the strategic map and recommendations on industry initiatives and fleet procurement would be left up to the Ministry of War and the General Staff – but instead to just convince the Board that these new inventions were actually real. And that meant the heavy end of the selling came down on me, as I was the one who actually had a successful prototype test of her invention as opposed to Dr. Saunders' still being in the theory-only stage.

But I managed to get through the week without embarrassing myself muchly, as well as being introduced to people I'd never expected to meet remotely this soon – and who prior to being augmented by the Forge I'd never expected to meet at all – including Secretary-General Adamson himself. They were all… very senior politicians, with all that implied, although I was at least gratified to find out that the Confederation wasn't actually being ruled by idiots. I'm not sure what kind of impression I made on them, because none of them had remotely climbed to such heights by being easy to read, but they certainly wanted me to believe that they were taking me seriously so hopefully that would do for now.

By the end of the dog-and-pony show – however deeply buried under wraps – it had been decided that the FTL comms project would be kept under a high but still 'not extreme' level of classification, with an eye towards being rolled out for general military use on a practical schedule. And while this would of course mean that Vilani intelligence would soon enough find out about it – even if they'd still do their best to obfuscate who exactly had invented it – that was of course the point. Because that would be the big shiny distraction intended to keep the Vilani from wondering what else was causing such a major long-range shift in Terran economic and military buildup planning… such as a jump-3 drive. Meanwhile of course the jump-3 drive would be rushed through from theory to practice in the minimum possible time, a full Manhattan Project style effort that would be done at Area 52 – the secret research complex known only by its code name, with not even the star system it was in known to even those who were stationed there but instead only to the carefully-screened pilots who took people there.

As it turned out, Area 52 was in the Peraspera system. But hey, it wasn't their fault I'd not only lived there for a year but had a perfect enough memory I could recognize the stellar configuration of its night sky just from looking out one of the station's viewports.

So my life had come full circle yet again to my first offworld assignment, even if I was entirely cut off from the colony I'd helped terraform by being in a sealed asteroid habitat complex on the other side of the system with the entire star in-between here and Peraspera proper. We weren't even in the system proper but in a deepspace hab built well out into the cometary halo, to the point the sensors of Peraspera colony couldn't even spot the jumpships arriving and departing here.

Dr. Saunders was of course riding high on the success of his achievement, ecstatic that his entire life's work had not been in vain. I didn't do anything to step on his mellow, although I did manage to spot another 'corollary' of my original FTL 'intuition' that let me solve the problem of deep-space emergence he'd been stuck on for the past several years, especially since I was sneaky enough to maneuver him into a joint collab on it. And that was by itself another strategic game-breaker as well as yet another layer of obfuscation over Terra's possessing jump-3, because of course another way to cross a 3+ parsec interstellar gap was to use a jump-2 drive and double fuel tanks to make two hops. Except that the Vilani couldn't do that because Vilani jumpdrive physicists had never solved the problem of how to emerge from jumpspace not inside a larger gravity well, meaning you couldn't aim jumps at deep space. Even StarLeaper One had only been able to make its double-jump hop to Barnard's Star because they'd had a 'rogue' brown dwarf star drifting through interstellar space to make its midway stopover at.

As I was considered to be the superior multi-disciplinary engineer to Saunders' superior physicist, I managed to quietly do the lion's share of converting math into engineering reality while also doing a bit to shrink the size and power requirements of jumpdrives, so that the conversion from jump-2 to jump-3 for the fleet could be done without having to rebuild existing hulls from scratch but instead merely by swapping out engine modules. This would still be a multi-year project, especially given that most of the shipyard techs couldn't be told what the 'overhauls' actually were for, but the General Staff was figuring that they could sell the new engine modules as a reliability and power upgrade without revealing that they were also jump-3 capable as soon as you swapped out the existing firmware… after all, it's not like the shipyard techs actually went into the deepest guts of the drive modules even as they were installing the things. And my Ragnarok-Proofing also let me modify existing technology to help gain the insane ruggedization and lack of maintenance requirements that Battletech gear had, so it's not as if the new jumpdrives wouldn't legitimately be a massive reliability upgrade in addition to their extended range.

Another point went into my mental 'tally' of 'Maybe not my minder' when I managed to convince Mira to take some home leave – after all, I didn't exactly need a full-time CSA bodyguard while in Area 52 and her birthday was coming up and she really should be allowed to spend that at home. Meanwhile, I had jumpdrives to design and build, long-range plans to brainstorm, and an exploration ship to help convert into mankind's first jump-3 vessel, which would hopefully soon set off on an exploration voyage into the hinterlands of the starmap directly away from the Vilani Imperium – the 'far side' of Terran space that jump-2 limitations had kept us from exploring, as stuck into an astrographic 'pocket' on the fringes of the Imperium as we were. I was still angling to get myself a place on that expedition, on the grounds that one of the primary designers of the jump-3 drive should be in position to kick the damned thing if it needed field repairs underway, but they were still debating whether or not they could risk me. In addition, I had several other ideas I needed to figure out how to get into the R&D pipeline, and whether or not I should…

Oh yes, 2170 was going to be quite the busy year for all of us.

* * * * *

Interlude
Daegu, Republic of Korea

For all my life, I'd been pretty good at reading people. Rather an expert at it, actually. That's how I'd ended up in the career that I did. But even with all that, I'd never met anyone quite like Sophia Nowak.

Protective Category Two-Alpha (Special) was not a designation that was often used, to say the least. For all that the holodramas liked to use the trope of the hero(ine) whose mind was so uniquely valuable to the Confederation that they were worth any amount of effort to safeguard and retain, the fact remained that even possessing a once-in-a-million level of genius meant that the Confederation still had thousands and thousands of you, with dozens more of you popping up every year. And the Advanced Aptitude Tracking and Coordination Council's job was to make sure none of those geniuses were wasted in any 'frivolous' pursuits but instead put to where the Confederation could get maximum utility out of them, even if that was – like anything else done by human hands – not an entirely perfect effort. To be blunt, even valuable people could still be replaced. Not without cost, which is why they still weren't expended casually, but it still normally wasn't the end of the world if you lost one.

So to see that designation given out twice in the same year was an unprecedented thing indeed. Being present to observe two out of the three greatest scientific breakthroughs in modern history was even more shocking. And to be the assigned close-cover agent to one of those two principals was a position I'd never remotely expected to have in my life.

When I'd originally been told that my latest assignment would be a Two-Alpha Special to the latest young supergenius in the military R&D pipeline, I'd originally thought that this was going to be another traitor hunt. After all, one of the other reasons Two-Alpha Special existed – and was allowed to be known to exist – was that it was a perfect way to stick a full-time observer on a VIP when there wasn't sufficient evidence to just get a surveillance warrant on them the old-fashioned way. Even people engaged in the sort of activity they'd absolutely not want a CSA agent observing them do were too often vulnerable to the ego-stroke that being designated 'of unique value to the Confederation' gave them, regardless of how unlikely that would actually be in real life. After all, there was a reason that Ego was one of the classic four routes to compromising someone as an intelligence asset.

But then they gave me the dossiers on my new principal and I realized that no, this time they were playing it straight. While several of my other assignments had been as much Counter-Intelligence as they'd been Protective Mission, this time the higher-ups legitimately wanted Sophia Nowak kept as alive and productive as possible, nothing more. And once having looked at her classified records I could entirely see why. Even if the idea of someone spontaneously developing superintelligence later in life was an absurd plot straight out of comic books, the fact remained that she had done so, to the point that she'd been able to advance the timeline on the terraforming of Peraspera by decades despite being the juniormost intern on the project, and then going on to make multiple order-of-magnitude improvements in capacity, reliability, and efficiency on a core infrastructure technology – as a kitchen-bench project in her spare time, while attending college. And then, of course, there had been her theoretical breakthrough in FTL research, which had led to her being placed in Category Two-Alpha Special in the first place… a placement that had only been doubly confirmed when her breakthrough had somehow cascaded into another breakthrough at the Skunk Works, for jump-3 of all things. The two Holy Grail technologies that the General Staff would have sold their souls to get, and both of them arrived in practically the same month, and all due to the same person. Honestly, at this point I was mildly surprised I was still the principal agent assigned as opposed to being replaced by a team of me.

Of course I was still serving as much of a 'monitor' role as a 'bodyguard' role – but not in the loyalty-minder sense, but instead in the psychological-observer sense. Lieutenant Nowak's unique neurological situation meant that the normal psychological vetting process was of doubtful utility with her – since we knew almost nothing about how her brain was really working now, we couldn't really rely upon normal statistical psycho-metrics to evaluate and predict her behavior. And thus the non-overt portion of my job, which was to keep a full-time eye on her and hope that good old-fashioned empathy and intuition could do the job that modern psych-testing couldn't... to monitor her mental stability, and to hopefully be able to suggest useful intervention if anything started going off-track.

So it was a hell of a relief to get there and note that her mad science was actually not that mad at all, and that despite certain personality quirks and more than a bit of job stress Sophia was generally a mentally sound and stable individual. And also a very nice person that I was really growing to like. Somebody with her background, and then suddenly given nigh-superhuman capacities, had every chance of growing an ego to match their achievements and more but she was if anything an oddly humble sort, and one with a strong ethical grounding besides. I wouldn't be meeting her parents until her next home leave, and I only knew the outlines of their lives from their much scantier files, but just from having met their daughter and seeing the job they'd done raising her I anticipated that I'd very much like them when we finally did meet.

Which didn't change the fact that there was just something not fitting about Sophia. And I didn't mean her big shiny superbrain, I meant her apparent imposter syndrome. Sometimes she acted like she still didn't believe her level of intelligence was real, or that maybe one day she'd wake up and it would be gone… which to be fair was a distinct theoretical possibility. 'Flowers For Algernon' was one of the most classic short stories in science fiction for a reason. And just thinking about the tragedy of a temporary mental augmentation that you then lost and spent the rest of your life remembering how it had felt to have such insight but forever being unable to actually possess it again… I'd read that story once in secondary-ed, bawled my eyes out, finished the assigned book report on it, and then never opened the damned book again. Of course, with my recall I still had every word of it memorized. So if I one day had to watch my new friend go through the same process… God, I hoped not.

But the more closely I observed her the more I guessed that no, that wasn't it. Sometimes it felt more like not that she didn't believe her new mind was real or permanent, but that she didn't believe she deserved it. Particularly not since I'd happened to be looking at her expression the moment that Dr. Wilson had brought her in on the jump-3 breakthrough, and how it hadn't seemed to be surprise so much as… a different type of surprise?

The more closely I watched her in the weeks that followed the more I was convinced of my original hunch. Sophia hadn't been surprised that her original FTL equations had also contained the hidden key to the jump-3 breakthrough, she'd been surprised that someone else had found them. Or at least that was the stubborn impression I couldn't shake, no matter how absurd it felt to me. If she'd spotted the breakthrough herself, then why conceal it? She was at least as loyal to the Confederation as I was, and certainly more than intelligent enough to know how strategically vital such a development was. So why not inform her chain of command right away?

Admittedly, it could just have been the simplest explanation – she'd only figured it out shortly before starting her vacation, and making the announcement then would have cancelled her leave time and she was already burnt out and desperately wanting some time off. I could entirely understand that, and there wouldn't even be anything wrong with such an impulse…

… except for her confession to me shortly after our first meeting that she felt like 'a fraud'. Which made me keep coming back to the stubborn idea that she'd deliberately held off on announcing the jump-3 breakthrough because she was hoping Dr. Saunders would spot it first and thus get the credit. He was the senior scientist in the FTL research division after all, and one whose originally-promising career had dead-ended in recent years. And then who'd been massively shown up by the newest young prodigy, his professional life ending in obscurity, until he'd finally reclaimed his place with his latest invention…

I shook my head. It just didn't fit. No one was saint-like enough to deliberately pass on receiving the credit for that huge an achievement, not unless they entirely didn't value such achievements at all – which Sophia clearly did, given the level of passion she brought to her work. And yet I just couldn't shake the impression that she had done precisely that.

Not that I'd reported this suspicion of mine, of course. It was obvious from Sophia's file that attempting to 'play' her would only result in her sealing herself off like a shipboard hatch – she was not the sort of person who trusted easily or at all once her trust had been violated. And she was of course far too insightful to try casually lying to. My policy of being reasonably transparent and aboveboard about my real aptitudes and motivations had been the only thing that got me this far, and that was on top of the fact that she was legitimately becoming a friend.

So since this anomaly wasn't evidence of either disloyalty or instability – both of which I'd be professionally obligated to report – I'd kept it to myself. Whatever was going on with Sophia, whatever odd impulse had me spending the evening before my own birthday party out here on the patio deck wondering up at the night sky instead of in there with my family, I'd have to solve that problem on my own. Because there was clearly some type of giant X-factor in this equation that I was missing, and while I might not necessarily need to know what it was, I still wished I would.

Who knows? Hopefully, one day she'll trust me enough to just tell me what it is.. And hopefully whatever it is will be something that I can protect her from, or that I won't need to.

But until then, we each still had our job to do.

* * * * *

Author's Note: Yes, cue the screeching that Sophia is actually letting the jumpdrive research be led by someone else, down another path. And yes, it's largely due to the emotional reasons she acknowledges herself. But she still has an entirely logical point that with the original main quest completed – which it was, in chapter 8 – she doesn't have to operate on super time pressure anymore, and that not forcing the pace too much both avoids spooking her chain of command and lets the social dislocations of what she's doing not go supercritical.

Still figuring out which tech tracks and what big social effects I should try next, but at least I can progress some characters and set some stages.

Unspent CP: 400
Purchases: Transhuman Protocols (Generic Cyberpunk)

Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

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