Chain 015: Dahak Chronicles

Chain 015: Dahak Chronicles
Location: Earth, 5,367 B.C.
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+600] Empire of Ashes, Anu's Attention
Scenario: [+600] Heir of Empire
(Abilities: Regeneration, Salvage Engineering, Robotics Genius, Society: Cybernetic, Artificial Alloys)
[Free]      Real Hotshot
[100/2200]  Tech Savvy
[300/2200]  Bridge Officer Descendant
[600/2200]  MacIntyre Luck
[1000/2200] 4th Imperium Weaponry
[1100/2200] Resource Management
[1500/2200] 4th Imperium Cybernetics
[1600/2200] Basic Implants
[2000/2200] Transmat Blueprints
[2200/2200] Bridge Officer Implants

There are a great many difficult things about this. Firstly, after my lesson on Chiron that ended with having to lobotomize the planet itself... well, Anno 2070 wasn't a place I felt the need for it, but this is one where I wanted every advantage. And yet, I felt a strange resistance against becoming an Achron again. And the same with magic. Or telepathy and empathy. And yet, robotics and cybernetics are just fine. Strange - and it doesn't help that I know nothing about the world I'm entering. That I never do in advance, I simply wake up, attempts to get my bearings, and draw upon the apparent source of my power. I will have to adapt and overcome, I suppose. And while I have another set of technologies in my mind, I can't help but wonder if it's like the technologies of the Clan and Inner Sphere, where I still know the broad strokes but only because I'd studied them at length.

(I wonder, though: if I don't maintain Salvage Engineering, will I lose everything I've reverse engineered? No, it should mean I simply can't seamlessly figure out technologies... right?)

I was more than a bit distressed to find myself in the ancient world, but... no, there is no 'but', I am thoroughly lost in the middle of the Sahara savannah. Over the course of the next couple of years I joined with some of the local tribes, while I quietly worked on my own cybernetics. The equipment I woke with, that augmented me quite nicely, it was good... but lacking defensive power. Subdermal neutronium plate, though, that was a different matter entirely; a detached part of me wondered if this was how Tinkers felt, trying to improvise technologies. Offensive capability was limited, but that was what concealed holsters and a hold-out particle beam pistol were for - not that I had need of them while I learned the tribe's ways, at least. And for a time, things were good.

Things were much less good when, rather inexplicably, I was pronounced by a traveller to be the heir-apparent of another tribe. Certainly this should have been a positive thing, but as I travelled back to the other tribe I and the traveller who was taking me to them were attacked. He was all but disintegrated by some sort of snub-nosed pistol. Truly one of the more ridiculous designs I'd seen, though I have no idea why this thought crossed my mind at the moment that my chest was blown apart by explosive flechettes.

They did not verify that I was dead, to their detriment. And when it was clear that I HAD survived - since I'd picked myself back up and offered overtures toward verbal negotiations and surrender on my part - they proceeded to shoot me in the face with those same explosive rounds. There was, of course, no way a person could survive such a thing, and with me laid out on the ground (with a couple of extra rounds put into me for good measure) they walked away and left me for the carrion birds. A pity for them that I am not idiotic enough to rely solely on my regeneration - neutronium dermal armor, and neutronium reinforcement around vital organs. Including my brain. Unfortunately, not including my eyes.

(Regrowing one's eyes is excruciating. I do not recommend it.)

After that point I took to wandering away alone - the Sahara was a bit sparse as far as it came to food, but when one can have a plate from a feast on a daily basis, that's nearly enough calories to last all day. Much of my time was spent repairing the damage to the neutronium armor, as well as working on a new outfit - more adapted Centauri tech in it, though. Local-looking clothing constructed of silksteel worked, but this time I ensured that there were heavier defenses concealed. After all, I'd invested a lot of time with Aki's researchers, refining these to a small enough size that even a probe team could have effective defenses, let alone soldiers.

(It's very fortunate that I have the Pixelator; I don't have the tools to create the materials from scratch. I barely have the tools to assemble the finished product, and I thought I'd been prepared, with the warehouse's contents. Lessons for later.)

The next unexpected thing was not long in coming. I'd created what I thought was a covert base and had started to add Imperium technology to it to reinforce things. I'd created a few androids as 'helping hands' but I'd ensured they could at least defend themselves with impact pistols. I didn't waste anything so fancy as neutronium on them, but synthsteel armor was sufficient, and just for kicks I patterned it after the Imperium uniform design that I now knew how to make. Seeing the bunker come under attack while it was barely a third complete wasn't something I had anticipated, and I scrambled to bring the defenses up - portalling to the warehouse while the androids defended it, spawning a couple of squads of them out of the Pixelator and arming them with heavier guns. Of course, it was my luck that BOTH sides got involved on the assault, shooting both at the bunker and each other. When I managed to get the tachyon field up for defense... things simply escalated. Which caused things between THEM to escalate. Discretion being the better part of valor, I absconded to the warehouse.

With me being in the warehouse, they all assumed I was dead; the other portal to the warehouse was a good distance away. This is fortunate, because the little war I'd sparked between the two mutineer factions turned the Sahara into a desert and killed most of the people who lived there. I hear the survivors made their way to Egypt and were working on a dynasty there, so that was good.

(Anu is vying for the Queen of Escalation title, as he's using female body at the moment. I will have to out-escalate him.)

I did not leave the warehouse until I was certain I could insulate myself from any potential EM frequencies that could pick my implants up, this time. Lessons learned. After that, I crossed the Mediterranian (and the boat only sank once! I made it to an island, at least! This is what Endurance 3 in Body Mod is for!) and established a new base, dug into a Himalayan mountainside. From there, in a base that I was QUITE certain was properly shielded first and foremost this time and that power generation was fed to the base through a portal to the warehouse, I spent a couple of months working on a spaceworthy and stealthed skiff.

When I scanned from orbit, I'm certain that I would have certainly missed the locations of the bases hidden in the Earth if it had been the modern era or if I had anything less than the best possible equipment I could painstakingly put together. But thanks to their fusion reactors, even in standby mode I could detect them. And this was perfectly fine... until I detected a whole lot more deep within the moon itself. This... is a thing. More of a thing: piloting the skiff to investigate the Moon gets me pulled aboard it.

Dahak, as the emergent intelligence within the battle moon called itself, was a very verbose individual who liked to string a person along in his mannerisms. I chalked it up to loneliness, and I could honestly understand that. But once things settled in... and he finished interrogating me as to how I had an implant suite that HE had designed out of sheer boredom and hadn't given everyone out... I told him everything. And I do mean everything: my nature as a traveller of worlds, the abilities I could draw on. The places I'd been before, the technologies there - and I cheerfully opened the secondary portal to the warehouse and pulled out data lines so he could access the Schwarzeneggar Presidential Library and the Planetary Datalinks archive in the warehouse, so that he could both verify the truth of being able to reach an extradimensional space and access the data I could give him. In turn, we exchange his knowledge of the Imperium and what happened here, and my HIGHLY limited knowledge of the setting. Now, I realized where I was, and I told the future as it was written, because I hadn't read Mutineer's Moon in a decade.

("Fifty thousand years after the mutiny, the enemy came back, but some guy in a one-man shuttle got onto the moon, did some HILARIOUSLY improbable things and was pronounced emperor of mankind, then you guys fought them off but I can't remember how, also the Imperium is gone, sorry". This is literally the extent of my knowledge, without being able to use Savant to draw on photographic memory of my past life.)

On the plus side... this made things a lot easier. Especially after having scouted the base locations. Civilization has a limited number of cities at this point, and quite frankly I was more than happy to collaborate with Dahak to improve the androids I was sending out, especially once Dahak realized I had a talent for working on alternatives to the traditional materials. Which made rooting out the various bases of mutineers a lot easier than it otherwise might have been. Especially the ones who were masquerading as Egyptian gods.

(I still had to drop a Singularity Planet Buster on Antarctica, but it ensured that Anu was in no state to make any threats. Their shielding is strong, but not THAT strong. Also the southern hemisphere is a lot more rainy now.)

After that point came Unification - a century-long project meant to bring humanity together and uplift it to a more modern and sustainable standard. It wasn't something that could be done overnight, by any stretch of the imagination - in fact, a century was an underestimate, but a hundred fifty years was enough. A united Earth. And somehow in the middle of that Dahak crowned me the Emperor of Mankind, apparently. Which is all well and good, I suppose, but the proliferation of a healthy mix of Centauri and Imperial tech helped the design and growth of human civilization, even if it meant that virtually every culture in existence would see the end of their cultures within two generations. Frankly, though, there are worse fates.

The biggest challenge with Unification coming at 5,000 BC was simply a matter of raw numbers. Less than twenty million people in the first official census. Sure, that's bad, but helping people become trained within professions meant that humanity could be bootstrapped. Without worrying about a mortality rate, and with planning construction of cities in key locations across the globe and migration to those cities... humanity doubled in size every fifty years for the next five hundred, on average. This was due in large part to infant mortality abruptly approaching zero, not to mention implants and gene-tailoring extending life for the average citizen to a half millennium or longer.

Dahak left the shell of the moon and a singularity within it, to maintain the tides, and once we had the trained personnel for a crew we scouted around the former Imperium. It was nearly completely depopulated, aside from one planet of humans that we could find, and the Imperial zoo. Still, transmats were put in place, the other planet was brought into the fold rather a bit more carefully than it might have been by anyone with the last name of MacIntyre, and between the two worlds the recolonization and militarization of the Imperium began.

(I remember it being easier than this. Still, at least the Emperor's word is law, as long as he's careful about it.)

Old military designs were brought up to snuff with what existed and could be salvaged from the apparent civil war that I had COMPLETELY forgotten happened. Transmats with bio-filters were put in place on various planets. Research into the refinement and improvement of Imperial technologies took place, though FTL was still limited to something on the order of warp seven, if memory serves. But transmat made journeys between planets trivial, and fleet personnel regularly rotated as needed. And, for a time, it was good.

Some seven thousand and odd years after I arrived here, the Achuultani arrived to cull any animal bigger than twenty kilos.

Now, a battle moon serves a single purpose: to engage a small fleet on its own without sustaining more than minor damage. A fleet of battle moons cannot be matched, saved by another battle fleet - especially when in EM war mode. No amount of hacking can interfere with a computer system in autistic mode, not when the only link to the outside world is a hardened communications platform. In an emergency... well, there are on-board transmat gates. Having a runner to ferry communications between ships is a very viable strategy.

Our fleets charged forward into the enemy armadas, their armor upgraded with antimatter plate, phase locked in probability sheaths. They met the fleets in the space between stars, their drives pulling the enemy out of hyperspace and ambushing relentlessly before they could reach their targets. They followed the fleets on the return vector, the adversarial intelligence behind it all identified from the wreckage and the few live personnel we captured.

As much as we wanted to have mercy, we were forced to crack the planet that the adversarial intelligence resided on, and it was far better defended than anticipated... but not so much as we feared.

(We lost no ships... but the adversary lost the planet it existed on, and the empire was suddenly without AI and with a race prepared to take them in as equals, instead. I'd count that as a win.)