SHAD
I stood on the bridge of the Ad Astra as she came through the transfer portal. Grandpa was in command, his tight face showing no sign of what he might be thinking at this time. The bridge crew were all Misfits Guild members, and civilians. But as the Ad Astra had been leased to the Earth Expeditionary Force to support this exploit, my grandpa — now Lieutenant General Twofeather — was in command.
I would be heading up most of the exploit strategy, overseeing our teams as they deployed into the rogue Reality Engine. Juana was along as the owner's representative and also our legal advocate.
We had spent plenty of time over the last couple of years hashing out the separation of concerns. The Ad Astra belonged to the guild. Several Guild teams would also be taking part in the exploit. We had reserved 10% of the ship's capacity for our own people. That left plenty of room for the Expedition Task Force.
In the holds, we had nearly 10,000 humans all eagerly awaiting their turn at the rogue. A drop in the bucket compared to what the Galactics were fielding. Grandpa and I had fought a lot of battles to make sure we were only bringing along people who were prepared for this. Almost all of Misfits Guild's personnel were crafters and farming experts. The Earth Expeditionary Force was front-loaded with warrior groups who intended to plunge the depths of this rogue engine. But they'd heeded our advice and brought along plenty of support personnel as well.
"Not much to look at," Grandpa commented as we studied the screen. We had emerged into the blackness of space, far between stars. I couldn't even see the world we were approaching. Everything out there was black. It was honestly creepy. This world had been ejected from its home system millions of years ago by its sun going nova. I'd seen pictures of it: one face scarred and bubbled from the nova's heat. It had lost any atmosphere it might have had at that time. A dead world of rock, without even ice to break up the tedious hellscape.
But inside was one of the most precious artifacts in the entire galaxy: a reality engine left behind by the first known species to inhabit our galaxy billions of years ago. We called them the Progenitors. They had flourished across the galaxy.
From some comments Kronos, our own reality engine’s Overmind, had made, I suspected they were actually multiple species who had come together in a Star Trek-style federation billions of years ago, not that it mattered now. They were gone now, though not all the same way. Some had left the galaxy entirely. Others had chosen to seed raw worlds with basic patterns of life and then die. The rest had retreated inside their reality engines, enormous computers capable of reshaping matter and energy, of simulating almost anything you can imagine, or creating it out of component atoms. Over the course of billions of years those ghosts in the machine had gone senescent and been absorbed into the Overmind.
When intelligence had emerged in the galaxy again, they had discovered the treasure troves left behind. Since then, all galactic society was built around locating and exploiting reality engines. Whenever a new one was found, the galactics would come in, grab a bunch of dupes from the local planet, and dump them onto the reality engine, using them as shock troops to scour the engine for its treasures, while the aliens' own Dominator system bent the reality engine’s Overmind to their will.
That's what had happened to my family—me, Grandpa, and my at-the-time kid sister— seven years ago now. We'd been snatched up from our home on the Arizona Strip and dumped into a reality engine. Told to fight for our lives, for resources, in order to pay off a slave contract we'd never agreed to sign. We'd turned the tables on them, helping free Earth's reality engine from its bonds before it could be fully harnessed. Now, with our reality engine’s Overmind, Kronos, as our ally, we humans were starting to make our own stamp on the galaxy.
We'd participated in several other reality engine exploits since. It had left a bad taste in my mouth to help perpetuate the same system that had exploited us. We had people actively working on alternatives, developing technology based on the science that the Progenitors had left for us. It was going to take time, though, and we couldn't afford to let them come back in and take us over. So for now, we did what we had to.
This exploit, though, was going to be different. There were no native species here. The rogue engine fell into a piece of space that was claimed by three different power groups. I don't fully understand how galactic politics work. It's a combination of government and corporate interests working together in ways the plutocrats of Earth could only have dreamed. The result was that one of the three factions claiming the reality engine was the assholes who had tried to exploit Earth's engine, led by the galactic conglomerate known as Proxima. While I didn't like them, we were familiar with them. Juana thought they were our best bet for getting contracts and selling our goods from this exploit.
The other two groups I had yet to meet. One was a violently racist bunch of space elves known as the World Song. Don't ask me how anyone can be racist when the galaxy is filled with so many different species. Many of us follow the same sort of basic patterns. The space elves, for instance, come from multiple different home worlds, but there it was.
The other faction was an extremely bureaucratic group, mostly Talonians and human variants, who had a long Soviet Socialist Republic style name. We just called them the KDRP. Juana said they were a pain to deal with and her Galactic Contracts class had basically boiled down to “don’t work with these guys, they’ll screw you over and make you pay for it”.
With everyone else squabbling over their share of the profits we ought to be able to fly below the radar and get things done. We had several goals at this reality engine. First and foremost in my mind was showing people back home what we were capable of with a bit of organization. The EEF would be scrutinized by higher-ups 80 light years away. Any mistakes we made would be dissected by military analysts who'd never even bothered to leave Earth. I was determined to make a good showing.
We were poised to make a killing, too. Our crafters were itching to get their hands on materials and patterns from this engine, to turn around and re-sell to the combat miners. It had served us well in the past, and no reason to think this would go differently.
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The other motive, of course, was to learn why all the aliens were so excited about this rogue engine. Something about this was different, and I wanted Earth to get a share of whatever treasures were to be found here.
I was also excited to see a larger earth force in action. I had spent the last few years in missions with allies or back home building up combat teams, and teaching other trainers. It had been a while since I'd gone into action with a big group of Earthers. I wasn't getting my hopes up too much. Grandpa and Juana rightly reminded me on a regular basis that I was management now and would be spending most of my time liasing between the Task Force and our civilian contractor groups.
Besides, there was Mila to think of. My daughter was turning into a real chatter box. Her dark eyes were as beautiful as her mother's, her curling black hair took my breath away every time I tousled her head. Juana and I had brought her along, of course. We'd done our research and the exploit shouldn't be dangerous for the support ships. Besides, bringing her was the only way we could get Mama Grace to come along. My mother-in-law wasn't going to be separated from her only granddaughter, and I didn't want to go without her exquisite cooking skills.
Right now, Grace and Mila were down in the living quarters, waiting for our arrival when they'd begin to configure things for the exploit. We were likely to be out here for over a year, perhaps two or even three, and the Ad Astra would be our home base.
"Switching to system overlay," the Ad Astra's intelligence said. Coyote, as he liked to be called, was a sliver of our reality engine's mind who had agreed to help us out by piloting the Ad Astra and making sure we were able to communicate with various alien systems. Despite the fact that our first meeting had been somewhat contentious—he'd held me prisoner for days, making me break rocks under the hot sun—I liked and trusted Coyote. He had been doing Ethereum runs with a human crew for the last several years to make sure Kronos had a big enough stockpile for while the Ad Astra was out of reach.
Now the screen in front of us blossomed to life. The planet appeared, shining gold as Coyote highlighted it for us. There were multiple circles on the planet's surface.
"This is a best approximation," Coyote said. "The outer layer has already been penetrated in multiple places by the galactic Dominators, allowing access to the reality engine itself in multiple locations.”
"That's Dominators plural?" Grandpa asked sharply.
"Yes. There was an incident with the survey team trying to install a dominator. Their system was destroyed and now we have at least eight different factions trying to establish their own dominion. Most exploit groups have a system to safeguard their ship, the same as Coyote does for us. In place of having large scale dominators installed, they are each trying to establish a safe entry point as best they can with what they have.. Each of the three major factions has two sub-factions making their own bids. There's also a bid from the Order of the Progenitors and one from the Union of Free Worlds. Also, there’s a lot of backchatter about tightened security. It sounds like they’re worried about terrorism.”
"I've made outreaches to the Union of Free Worlds,” Juana said. "They're one of the few groups out there who actually consider the Grignarians to be worth talking to. I'm interested in seeing if we can do business with them.”
“From what I can tell, the reality engine is already badly fractured. Each faction is trying to make an alliance with a different fragment or group of fragments. That’s not usual at this stage of an exploit. The engine isn’t generally awake enough to be fractured. By the time fragmenting begins, the galactic controller system is generally in command.”
“Interesting,” Grandpa said. “Can we make use of that?”
“Remains to be seen. The overlapping circles I am projecting onto the surface of the planet represent the control zones of each faction. The areas in between, highlighted in red, are still under the control of the largest fragment of Overmind. It's actively fighting us. We need to be careful to remain inside a stabilized zone of dominion when we attempt to access the outer layer of the reality engine. Either we make a deal with a fragment, or we pay a faction who has a deal to let us access their zone.”
“Can Coyote exert a zone of dominion for us?”
“No. I don’t have enough power unless I can convince a fragment to let my will into its own zone.
"Right," Grandpa said. "Our goals for this initial phase of the exploit will be to accumulate soul coin or whatever equivalent this rogue engine offers. To develop a beachhead we can use for accessing deeper inside. And to determine everything we can about this engine. Information is going to be currency here.“
"We have an advantage here," Coyote said. "Due to what happened with the survey team the engine is fragmented. This is not a scenario galactics are accustomed to dealing with, whereas your people have been working with fragments for the last few years. They may not know how to handle it.”
“Not sure we do either,” I said. "When's Colin supposed to get here?"
Colin Trevelyan had, in the past four years, become the foremost expert on dealing with reality engine fragments. It was a bit of an art all to itself. He and his team had almost single-handedly reunified Kronos, one fragment at a time, taking on each, plumbing its depths, determining how to best reintegrate it with the main body of Kronos. He was a bit delayed because he had been conducting a seminar for some of our allies out at Hyperia. He and my sister should be coming in on an alien transport ship any day now.
"We think they're still two days out," Coyote reported. He then highlighted a massive structure orbiting the planet. It was a ring around the dead world. We could make out the individual blocks and cubes woven together. It was like someone had transported a scaffolding into space, bent it around the planet and filled it with hundreds of thousands of interlocking cargo containers and pods..
"Most of the Galactics have chosen to make use of standard living pods and cargo facilities," Coyote said.
I had seen a few Galactic freight ships in motion. Enormous, miles-long vessels made up of conglomerations of pods like these, all shipped around. They were transported between star systems in the blink of an eye by the portal system. I imagined all these pods had come in on a ship and then joined up to the framework.
"I've received our assigned sector coordinates," Coyote said, highlighting them. It was a big open space in the framework.
We approached. “Deploy the living facilities," Grandpa said.
I held my breath. We tested this four times already and simulated it hundreds more. It was perfectly safe, but my kid was down there. The Ad Astra positioned itself in the center of our designated area, then expanded its cargo facilities. Our holds opened up and flattened out the pods within them. We nuzzled into our berth.
"Docking procedures completed," Coyote reported after a minute.
I breathed easily. We are now receiving inputs from the exploit facility structure. Now that we were docked, the command and drive portions of the Ad Astra could lift off of the cargo section if needed. That would allow us to go and resupply should our stores run low or handle another emergency. We had some cargo capacity reserved for if we needed to make an Ethereum run or bring more people back to the exploit.
Otherwise, the Ad Astra would remain here. If we did have to leave, we'd be taking Coyote with us, which would leave our miners and exploit team members at the mercy of working with one of the alien systems. I didn't want to do it, but having the option might end up saving our lives.
Grandpa stood up. He brushed his hands off. "Alright, we're here. Everybody knows what the next steps are. I expect we'll be getting some calls from our new neighbors in the next few hours. Department heads, consult your departments and meet back with me at 1400 hours for a debriefing."