Chapter 19: Chapter 19: False Gods Aren't We All

I woke up. It was the third quarter of the eighth year of my new life.

No major reports or developments this time 'round -- excepting that a small number of Hosts had taken to attempting to find ways to reproduce in a manner that actually had them as parents, rather than simply creating blank copies that would have to evolve on their own. An interesting development but one that the Thinktanks had taken to with aplomb in exploring the consequences of. The steampunk-wuxia world was still inaccessible to my people. They'd taken to dropping highly stealthed remote probes into low orbit and using the sensor arrays thus produced to at least get the universal translators a working copy of the local languages, to try to listen in on what in the world was allowing the locals to be so damned effective. The probes were constantly destroyed by steam-cannon fire from airships that had been in the vicinity. Steam cannons that should not be able to launch effective weapons that kind of distance. The drydocks were churning out Warseeds and Matrioshka Defense Stations as quickly as they could. My diadem had undergone an upgrade of design efficacy due to a breakthrough related to recursion in Dho-Na programming that permitted it to operate as a Class 5 ward. The Heartseed was still awaiting tests of confirming the changes would remain stable when operating at that scale, at which point the infrastructural equivalent of an entire extra city would again be invested in upgrading the eldritch defenses of my little corvette.

There was even an inclusion of attempts to re-engineer the Kromagg biohull clotting into a sort of ablative armor by extruding the fluid in self-structuring ways that could take advantage of terra-root superconductive roots as batteries to run embedded hull polarization nodules for just long enough to stave off incoming weapons-fire. The approach intrigued me but there was no sign of practical implementation being reached yet. Let alone integration with the standard biohulls of my fleet.

It seemed that putting myself at risk of instantaneous vaporization by the Asgard just to make contact with them had lit a fire underneath my people's posteriors in terms of trying to improve the defensive capabilities of our ships. They … were not happy about my decision to have done so.

They did, however, appreciate the choice of opening a rift Gate to a deadworld in conventional Gate range of the Stargate 'Verse. Even if the gates in question were in the Ida galaxy. Me, I just wanted a more stabilized method of making transits to and from the Milky Way and Pegasus Galaxy without having to worry about the Ori breathing down my neck. There was, of course, one small problem with that approach -- I lacked the means to actually power an intergalactic Stargate, let alone send a ship between galaxies in anything remotely like an acceptable timescale between trips. Even with the absolute best shipscale biotic FTL drive my people had designed, it would still take eight thousand years to travel the distance from Ida to the Milky Way. That was still impressive considering the Ida galaxy was four million lightyears from Earth.

A distance the Asgard could travel in mere weeks.

I didn't actually have any solutions to the problem, but it did bring me back to one of my apparently perennial and ongoing complaints. While the Heartseed herself now had the secondary interdimensional thrusters that required some other method of initiating the interdimensional shift in order to operate -- thus increasing the maximum interdimensional transit speed of the corvette from a mere three lights to something more like thirty -- those Jovian-made thrusters weren't the equal of the base design. I had a few basic notions of how to go about changing that fact, and I was about to take on one of those options in a manner that was perhaps the most aggressive form of first contact I'd yet made with a new Canon. The X-COM universe, to be precise.

I had originally intended to simply enter that universe "all guns a'blazing" but the Synod talked me out of it. Instead, I was taking the process I intended to execute "slow and steady". A quirk of my method of transiting between canons was that until I had actually arrived in a given world, I didn't actually have the means of feeling out alternative dimensions in proximity to it. So I'd have to enter the X-COM universe itself in order to find a safe location to set up a rift Gate -- if I even intended to do so. I wasn't, in all honesty, particularly inclined to make that decision. The human defenders of Earth in the X-COM narrative were … well. They weren't the greatest of people. They couldn't afford to be, but that didn't change what they were and how they did what they did. I was going to give them the breathing room necessary to maybe change all that.

But in order to do so, I had to, well, take some baby steps. One of which was an effort that had taken more of my time than I'd originally thought it would -- recruiting some of the Free Earth Republic's trained telepaths for the purposes of aiding another earth under threat of hostile incursion. You'd think they'd be all patriotic about it, but apparently most had a rather different impression of what 'patriotic' meant. A definition that somehow included not letting themselves be vivisected by my people, as though that was something I even needed to do in order to gain a robust understanding of their telepathy. It was annoying that it wasn't something that my Hosts could develop themselves as they lacked the appropriate neural structures; and it wouldn't be 'politick' for me to get direct training by their people. Apparently progress was being made on developing parapsychic Host tissue based on the telepathic control interfaces the Kromagg used in their technology, but I wasn't holding my breath on that.

One of the other things that was included in that list of baby steps was the reason why I found my Heartseed currently coupled with six Warseeds, the external automail connectors extending my sense of self-awareness into all seven total vehicles. This would be the heftiest transit I had ever yet made, and I was only transiting from Homeside to Secondside in the Mass Effect 'verse. Not even shifting my relative position over Starhaven. If anything could go wrong with this, I'd have the chance to Needlecast out or be resleeved immediately.

I took a deep breath, charging up all of the terra-root reactor nodes as I did, flushing the power systems of all seven ships to maximum output and maximum capacitance, near to the point of overloading the biohull material of the ships even after taking into account the hull polarization technology reinforcing the biohulls. Every last possible erg I could possibly get supplied into the biology of the ships was present.

I let reality slide out from underneath me -- or perhaps I let myself slide out from underneath reality. It was the same thing. I immediately found myself gasping for breath that didn't exist, even as I pushed myself back out into reality on SecondSide. All seven of the corvettes were in critically low energy reserves. There wasn't a single functional terra-root reactor node; the biohulls were just barely above the level of death. I coughed up blood -- not a fun reaction when a breathing mask is the only thing between you and drowning to death.

I didn't even have time to register it before Smiley was grabbing me out of the Tank and applying emergency procedures; operating a hand bioscanner to check my health and applying a stimulant and regenerative aid after separating me from the automail connectors. The coughing eased down. I blacked out… but at least it wasn't from the pain.

I woke up, lightly groggy. I found I had not, in fact, been resleeved. I would not have blamed my followers if they had, but they appreciated that I had sentimental attachments to this body. Smiley et.al. were good like that. I looked around myself and found that I was in a network-blanked and sterile medbay facility. I tried to focus enough to scry on my vicinity and winced; the area was ridiculously warded.

I tried to stand … err, make that sit … up, and struggled as I did so against an IV that was tugged into my right arm. Looking over I saw that it was a standard "banana bag" as was typically used for victims of malnourishment. I called out. "How long have I been under?"

Smiley shifted from his seat in the corner of my field of vision, his emoji display shifting to one -- how the hell did he find the damned things -- that somehow conveyed gentle concern. "You've been under for two days, sir. Your recovery rate is remarkable considering the depths to which your bioenergy reserves had been depleted."

I looked at Smiley's CRT faceplate, and just sighed. "Alright. Go ahead, buddy. I've earned this one."

Smiley's CRT turned into a wink emoji as he deadpanned, "I believe sir was in fact 'told so' about this outcome."

I snorted -- it was mildly painful, like exerting a pulled muscle. "Yeah, yeah, yuck it up. We had to know if the transit scaling problem was linear or progressive. This was the biggest amount of mass I could transit. I could always be resleeved without issue as long as I didn't die immediately, and the numbers indicated that what happened was the worst plausible outcome. It was a calculated risk of discovery."

Smiley's emoji turned into a frown, just briefly before returning to the 'default' artwork. "Sir will forgive me if I inform him that I was still worried."

I waved for Smiley to come closer, and waited until he did to reach up and place my hand on his shoulder. "I haven't earned that kind of concern. Don't argue with me. I'm telling you I appreciate it."

Smiley's emoji went to a green, well, smiley. It stayed that way for a full five seconds while we sat in the silence as I recuperated, before he spoke up again. "Has sir reconsidered his approach to the X-Com 'verse, then?"

I shook my head. "No. We're still going forward with the plan. All that's changing is the amount of assets I can bring to the table." One of the reasons why the seven-member 'honeycomb' approach had wonked out on me was because I'd insisted that each of the warseeds as well as my own Heartseed have their cargo holds loaded down with as many skycar "technicals" as they could load down. By 'technical', in this case, that meant the largest fighter-scale particle weapon that could be installed on a fixed mount on the roof of the skycar -- which honestly wasn't all that big, barely qualifying for fightercraft duty -- along with a pair of squad assault weapon-analogue particle weapons mounted on turrets embedded into the rear passenger doors. My intention was to load up the X-Com base with at least thirty of the craft, allowing them to engage in effective squadron tactics against the Ethereal's foes -- as well as using the minivan-scale vehicles as rapid passenger deployment for their usual small squad assault tactics. They wouldn't hold much in the way of cargo individually, but then they weren't really meant to do so. The addition of foldable kromagg-style antigravity vanes had given an ironic 'x-shape' profile to the vehicles, but also given the necessary boost to reach the hypersonic velocities that would make them effective in aerial combat against the Ethereals' vehicles. Especially once they started fielding pilots that could operate the telepathic control interfaces.

The technologies in the vehicles I was planning on giving them were technologies that they themselves could reproduce without a limited supply chain, and that was an intentional choice; I wanted these vehicles and small arms -- and the tritanium alloy from which their extremely light armor was made -- that I was planning on supplying them to be in the hands of the general populace of humanity as quickly as possible, rather than just exclusively in the hands of the X-Com operators.

My original intention for this universe was little more than a run-and-pump: the technologies that the X-Com personnel would eventually wind up reverse-engineering from the Ethereals they were fighting were all things that were essentially purpose-built to be readily reverse-engineered, but dependent on materials which themselves were not. It was a rather ingenious method on the part of the Ethereals to 'test' how capable a race was in terms of how they would fit into their existing clone-slave empire -- species that excelled at any one particular area would still be "failures" because they needed a species that was a generalist -- but they could still be slotted into service based on whatever they did well or poorly with out of the Ethereals' technologies. Plus, they maintained an additional form of control over their slaves by retaining the methods of production of those materials within tight control, allowing them to send their slaves on deep-range and long-term missions without risk of rebellion.

My plan was to simply drop into the universe, spread out the honeycomb formation and blast the crap out of every Ethereal vessel our scanners could detect, drop off the 'technicals' by the X-Com base, and give them the coordinates to the aliens' base on the Earth. While the X-Com troops were busy going over my gifts with a fine-toothed comb searching for traps that wouldn't actually be there, and arranging to raid the aliens' terrestrial base, my own people would be salvaging the wrecks of the alien ships for everything they were worth. I'd then wait to return a few months later to retrieve the Free Earth telepaths and see just how much havoc my playing silly buggers with the X-Com timeline would have created.

It seemed, however, that this notion was predicate upon my ability to move far more mass than I was in fact capable of moving, even with all the power generation my ships could possibly produce. Which was somewhat vexing since once of the reasons I wanted to get to the X-com universe was because I could increase the energy generation of my ships with some of the materials I could produce there.

I leaned back and enjoyed the warm fuzzy sensation of the drugs that were being pumped into my system.

I was entirely uncertain how I felt about this plan. It had barely been three months since I opened relations with the Asgard, but they were already -- reportedly -- much more willing to cooperate with me. Apparently, the alchemists I'd sent to start supplying them with eezo had included a cleric amongst their number -- a disproportionate number of alchemists in my empire were members of the cloth, in fact. They were maybe 1 in a hundred of the general population, but forty in a hundred of the alchemist population were clerics. Something to do with the study of alchemy not being able to be transferred via software as it required a unique personal insight to one's own soul that was non-transferrable, and the clerical meditations being especially useful in gaining that insight was one of the main recruiting tools to even temporary adoption of the cloth.

Regardless, that cleric had been rather open with the Asgard about his view that essentially, I was the Host's god and that they should really get their own. Somehow this, along with the awareness that I had actually taught the Hosts -- which the Asgard knew to be robotic beings -- how to use 'near ascended' powers, as they believed alchemy to be, had redeemed my relationship with my subjects in the eyes of the Asgard. Well, that and the fact that the Asgard had no more luck than I did in finding ways to dislodge said stole-bearer's faith and amusingly almost always responded to Asgard comments with something along the lines of "Yes, his Worship has made those arguments. I find them even less persuasive when coming from a being without His capabilities, and He wasn't able to convince me either." It would almost be funny if I didn't know for a fact that there were thousands of them now working to actually make me into a literal White Hat Cthulhu.

Anyhow. The newly revised timetable was for the Asgard to be allowed to study the Heartseed's interdimensional drive in use in their 'verse, in exchange for my being permitted to utilize an Asgard powersource for opening intergalactic gates. This plan having been derived from the fact that a Thinktank had determined that the regular stargate wormholes could be used to extend the range of an already-active interdimensional drive. This essentially meaning that as long as I allowed an Asgard observer aboard my Heartseed, I could almost instantaneously transit from the Ida to the Milky Way galaxy, thanks to their portable neutrino-ion generators. Their very black-boxed and sensor-scattering-material-encased portable neutrino-ion generators. I seriously believed that the Thinktanks were going gaga more over the sensor-shielding material than they were over the successful sensor returns from the operational stargates, which could conceivable provide a massive range and operational advantage should we manage to reproduce them without naquadah -- something I seemed to recall was very much possible.

All of this was leading up to what my current plan was: to flit about the Milky Way galaxy for a short while picking up various samples of technologies from the races and facilities I knew about. I honestly had a more difficult time thinking through what options I could pull off that were least likely to interfere with the local continuity -- or at least, least likely to interfere with the local continuity in ways that would harm the Tau'ri. Maybe it was already a pointless endeavor, given what I'd done for the Asgard, but I figured better safe than sorry.

There was one other aspect of the whole endeavor, however, I was fairly sure about. And that was the constant amusement I had been drawing over the last couple of weeks from the reactions of Gefion -- the Asgard assigned to studying my Heartseed's interdimensional drive -- to the basically everything of my corvette. I was extremely thrilled when I learned thanks to the universal translators the Asgard word for 'schizotech'. Warmed the very fiber of my being. Didn't have the heart to tell her the actual nature of how it all had come to fit together.

As my vessel came within orbit of Pangar, I activated my holo-avatar just behind Gefion in his quarters. For whatever reason, despite the fact that he had the same ability to technopathically interface with my Heartseed's systems as did every Asgard, she seemed to feel it would be "improper" to do so. "Hey there, Gef. Any new insights today?"

Gefion glared at my avatar. "It's rude to enter one's quarters without knocking."

I gave her a gimlet eye. "You … do realize that my ship's engine compartment are not your living quarters, right?"

She started and looked around the room she was in. "Oh." She audibly sighed. "And that alone should tell you the state of my study of your systems. They are just so very veljic!"

I started. "Did you just say 'veljic'?"

Gefion nodded absent-mindedly while looking at the glowy rocks of her console -- for all I could understand how their tech worked it might as well actually be magic. "Well, yes. And it is."

I quirked an eyebrow. "And … 'veljic' means?"

She just started muttering under her breath. I figured that was as good a translation as I was going to get. Even the universal translator was stymied by that one.

Happily, matters with the Pangarans were much more straightforward: Giving them a universal translator and pointing them at the ruins they had been excavating since forever showed them they'd screwed up and were slowly killing Egeria. A quick bout of medical attention and she was doing much better, and I showed them how to operate a basic tissue cloning operation that would give them the parts of the tok'ra symbiotes they'd been harvesting from to make their Tritonin, and that was two birds with one stone solved. Granted -- while I now had access to Egeria's genome including all of the knowledge of goa'uld technology her parent had encoded in her, I didn't really have a means of reading that information short of cloning her and implanting someone. Which didn't really seem all that kosher, given she was now going to live -- the Pangarans were even talking about trying to find a volunteer to blend with her. I had to leave behind the tech samples that she would wind up needing in her journeys, which vexed me a tiny bit, but I at least got some good scans in of the kara'kesh and healing hand devices, and that was a good start.

Without looking back I fired up the drive and headed for the next target -- Hebridian ion drives might not be that spectacular compared to everything else I could manufacture nowadays, but the alternative engineering principles involved and the scale they were typically manufactured at could at least give my Thinktanks some pointers. Plus, the Hebridians had at least goa'uld competitive shield and weapons technology I could maybe get civilian export trade samples of. I'd probably be able to get them to accept terra-root node cuttings as payment.