Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[nobodez]

I love the new chapter, and love that you've returned to this story, however brief or long it may be.

 

[Dgr11897]

Never. If the confed knew she made a bio weapon that could kill a entire race they would never let her out of a birdcage again with everything she does carefully watched.

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TBF. She didn't make it she realized the potential, and immediately was scared of it, to the point of destroying the sample. Honestly the bigger thing for them would be figuring out and worrying about where the hell a sample of alien nanotech that could do that even came from. Because it has to come from somewhere, and while Sophia decided not to use it that way, the original owners might.

 

[LollipoPReapeR]

With the her newly padded CP account, I hope the MC picks up some non-scientific perks. Preferably something to do with self-defense or counter intelligence. I'm sure there's some black box type perks around. Or something to stop her getting assassinated / kidnapped. Something that gives her more political / societal ability too…

 

[Toad]

Oho, this is back! No alien abduction this time around?

I didn't entirely hate it, but it was admittedly a bit sudden, and just when she was ramping up a bit

I do think removing her from the confederation eventually was at its core a good idea though, or else she just steamrolls everyone with a whole government apparatus behind her, would be interesting to see her be forced to work in less ideal circumstances and pick forge stuff that she needs to survive rather than what allows her to best minmax her situation

She does have a pretty big surplus of points though, so she's likely to be well equipped no matter what ends up happening

Also I'd honestly be more expectant of lesbian shipping if this was SV, site's kinda notorious for it lmao

 

[Asmodyne]

Hell yeah, psyched to see a chapter of this! Hope to see more in the near future.

 

[AbyssalMatter]

Looking at what the Interstellar Wars Source Book lists, she could have also given them the Word of Blake's Void Signature System and Mimetic Armor. Especially since she could probably fit the Void Sig. onto tanks and stuff and the Mimetic Armor is already used in Battle Armor. Also she could give them PPCs given that the lightest Particle weapon is like 200 tons. That's not even mentioning Gauss Weapons which I didn't see anything about.

 

[Ultim@tePower]

YES YES YES, hell yes my favourite fanfic is back, did a full reread and cannot wait for more.

I cannot wait until she breaks out the jump 9/KF and draw up plans for olympus like recharge station that would break everythimg EVEN MOAR.

also the basic Battletech war machines like PAL, Battle armor and super tough BT armor, no mechs tho

Hopefully, Confed High Command hurries up and puts a black box on both Nusku and Procyon, from what I remember the Imperium feints in Procyon then rushes through Nusku with most of the Confed fleet heading to Procyon, I dont kow if the black box works while in hyper, but heres hoping the counterattacking fleet gets delayed enough for Procyon to tell Terra that its a distraction.

Hell, even if the Procyon attack is real they could get wiped out by being jumped by a full response fleet a full week earlier than what they were expecting

 

[Fellgar]

Huh... interesting. This is back. So I take it the next thing that is researched is going to be the faster then light engine design that takes from local and battletech to allow them to travel 4 and 1/2 times as far as the current best drives? I expect you might also be considering looking at the heat pump tech from battletech as well. The a little to just delete heat like that from a system consistently is... interesting and like something you can blend with local designs for a similar effect to the engine. Then of course you will have the ability to enhance the power generation...

You know... I don't remember seeing anything about power armor in the local setting being mentioned. I know in battle tech it was based off of exo suit designs for space flight and I think logistical exo suits as well. So maybe introducing some viable invisible power armor from battletech with the whole ftl travel and comms allowing Terra to deep raid into the borders in a spy like manner. Eh glad to see this is back though!

 

[Blade4]

The first power armor were spec force stealth sneak suits that also happened to give some protection from mech scale weapons. And for some damn fool reason never reconfigured into a line suit that would have vastly improved infantry performance and survivability. Proper power armor was created from underwater mining suits much later by the clans.

As for Sophia with what she has on hand why could she not research a 3 or 4 parsec drive and work up to a kf drive? A 3 or 4 drive could fit in their current ships and still be a vast improvement and strategic asset.

 

[Slayer 10321]

The first power armor were spec force stealth sneak suits that also happened to give some protection from mech scale weapons. And for some damn fool reason never reconfigured into a line suit that would have vastly improved infantry performance and survivability. Proper power armor was created from underwater mining suits much later by the clans.

As for Sophia with what she has on hand why could she not research a 3 or 4 parsec drive and work up to a kf drive? A 3 or 4 drive could fit in their current ships and still be a vast improvement and strategic asset.

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Mech bias and the Mother Doctrine reared its ugly head.

Plus not even the Star League/Terran Hegemony wanted to shell out the funds to give their infantry anything good to use when said funds could go for more warships/mobile oppression palaces, battlemechs and mega-scale engineering projects.

 

[litaispe]

I'm sorry, jump-what? The Third Imperium doesn't even have jump-9. I'm surprised her reward for boosting tech in a military significant fashion didn't trigger here.

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k-f jump drives are software patch away from being jump-18, for just double the power-cost of a jump-8 jump.

 

[cliffc999]

As a reminder, the most advanced jumpdrive currently in the setting is the Vilani jumpdrive... which maxes out at jump-2.

Canonically, jump-3 would not be invented by Terra until circa 2240, during the Eighth Interstellar War. (The story is currently in 2169, in the period of time between the Third and Fourth Interstellar Wars.)

 

[litaispe]

As a reminder, the most advanced jumpdrive currently in the setting is the Vilani jumpdrive... which maxes out at jump-2.

Click to shrink...

Worse than that; Traveler jump-drive locks you into a ~168 hour travel duration. k-f jump-drives are functionally instant. That is an setting-breaking logistical buff just in itself.

 

[Blade4]

Mech bias and the Mother Doctrine reared its ugly head.

Plus not even the Star League/Terran Hegemony wanted to shell out the funds to give their infantry anything good to use when said funds could go for more warships/mobile oppression palaces, battlemechs and mega-scale engineering projects.

Click to shrink...

Which is utterly foaming at the mouth stupid when you look at cost and logistics. A single mckenna is like 30 billion according to sarna. A full task group is probably around 100 billion.

A single nighthawk suit is around 295k and change.

For the cost of a single battle group they could radically increase infantry ability and probably reduce casualties by around 75 percent giving a vast qualitative upgrade far better than that battle group could but no...

But yeah no one has better than jump 2 though the idea of someone getting better should scare the crap out of the vilani because jump 2 is how they put competed and beat down every other threat to them. So earth with jump 3 is a existential threat they must counter or pull into the empire by any means necessary. It would be very interesting if the shadow emperor? and court on the throne world actually get involved eventually because iirc they did not get involved in the wars until the colonial nonsense suddenly became a threat to fast for them to react to and ganked them.

 

[D King Hecht]

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

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

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"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,

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Just a small thing I noticed on a read through.

 

[cliffc999]

Ugh, yeah, continuity glitch. Fixed.

 

[Sto Odin]

...Which of course tells you exactly what kind of priority Sofia's case has. There are a lot of places an operative of Special Agent Song's caliber could have been assigned, but instead she's here.

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And that shows good sense on their part; it's kind of weird to have a government committee that puts a premium on common sense, but the Genius Patrol is notable that way.

Delighted to see you coming back to this one! I'm not overly familiar with the Traveller setting but it had a lot of richness to it and it's the sort of SF setting I cut my teeth on back when I was first reading the genre.

 

[Fellgar]

GURPS 4e has an entire Interstellar Wars sourcebook covering the original Vilani-Terran war era, but yeah, outside of that one it's not something Traveller ever touched.


Well, except for FTL comms, which in the Traveller setting are absolutely game-breaking.

Note that she successfully got Main Quest Completion in the most recent chapter. Sofia could drop dead right now and her minimum job would be done.


In addition, the size requirements are much larger. Note that in BTech, what would be considered the smallest size of scout vessel/picket ship would have the same displacement as a cruiser in Interstellar Wars. Sofia knows she won't even begin to sell the BTech jump drive until she can either massively reduce the size and power requirements and/or build enough of a rep they'll actually drop that kind of expense just on her say-so.

Getting all the way to jump-9 will definitely be a thing. Of course, in the canon Interstellar Wars timeline the Imperium bit the curb almost as soon as Terra got jump-3, because that's all you need to break out of the astrographic spacelanes the Vilani are locked into by the availability of 2-parsec jump routes and start doing things like cutting across empty interstellar space to enter and leave the enemy's interior lines in a way they can't match.

Click to shrink...

Something to keep in mind. Those are only the modern jumpdrives there where much smaller and cheaper jump drives earlier in battletech history. Back when humanity was expanding out.

So she can use the cheaper ones to prove her effectively teleportation style of ftl is better then what they have and still make it have the same range. Cutting out the travel time alone would already be amazing. The knowledge then that she could then create a design for something that is effectively jump 18... well. I look forward to reading the next chapter!

 

[drakensis]

Yeah, a Jump-5 with theoretical possibilities of Jump-9 would probably be a slightly more plausible first result to show off to investors.

 

[Panaka]

Something to keep in mind. Those are only the modern jumpdrives there where much smaller and cheaper jump drives earlier in battletech history. Back when humanity was expanding out.

So she can use the cheaper ones to prove her effectively teleportation style of ftl is better then what they have and still make it have the same range. Cutting out the travel time alone would already be amazing. The knowledge then that she could then create a design for something that is effectively jump 18... well. I look forward to reading the next chapter!

Click to shrink...

I have to reread the story, bit I remember something about being able to fuse the confed jump drives and the BT version for an overall better drive. Lower recharge time, can jump from far closer to the planet and some other stuff.
Lower material requirements could be part of that.

 

[Ultim@tePower]

I'm not a battle tech expert but from what I know there is a primitive jump drive at 15 light years or 6 parsecs but that's even more bulky and expensive, better to go with the refined version that has all the kinks worked out

 

[Geraldrold]

Yes pls moar!

 

[cliffc999]

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 observe 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 StarLeaper Two, mankind's first jump-3 vessel, which would in just a few months 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 her 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.

 

[Hypervane]

Author's Note: Yes, cue the screeching that Sophia is actually letting the jumpdrive research be led by someone else, down another path.

Click to shrink...

To be honest, I really like the idea of other scientists picking up where Sofia left off and nabbing innovations for themselves. Sure, Sofia could trailblaze the entire tech tree on her own but there'd be no point, since the Confederation wouldn't be able to keep up with that sort of ridiculousness. Sofia was trying to stall her creations anyway; now she gets a totally natural method by which to pace the stuff she makes!

Also, I like the idea of Dr. Saunders getting something to show for his work. I'm sure he's very happy and feeling mighty fulfilled, and that's enough to make me happy. I'm simple like that.

 

[Bob123123]

Surely now is the time for Sophia to cast off the shackles of mortality.

Also are you going to introduce psionics given that's a thing in the setting?

 

[GooseElite]

Good chapter, thanks for the update.

 

[cruiser221]

Oddly enough, I'm surprised that Sophia didn't feel more relieved that another made a breakthrough. It'd show her that the fate of her home doesn't only lie with her. It'd also show her that even if she has to hold back her tech, there might be someone that'd make the breakthrough for her, and that she's not alone. Honestly, I would've thought she'd tear up for that.

 

[cliffc999]

Also, I like the idea of Dr. Saunders getting something to show for his work. I'm sure he's very happy and feeling mighty fulfilled, and that's enough to make me happy. I'm simple like that.

Click to shrink...

Plus, as I made the Genius Patrol a setting element, I need to establish that they actually find geniuses on occasion. *g*

 

[SG-elbe]

So glad you decided to continue this story as far as you can. I love it. This is one of the stories that got me into the celestial forge gimmick.

 

[GrayBowser]

Hope we can see more of the collaboration with Dr. Saunders, the interactions of two geniuses like that bouncing off each other seems like it would be fun to watch.

Seeming to roll out jump-3 across the whole fleet with a firmware update would be a huge surprise to everyone not cleared for that secret too.

The Manhattan Project mention reminds me of this great article that talks about how they did it so quickly, by taking every option for each step in the process and building them all in parallel despite the massive cost of all the approaches that wouldn't work out.

If she does boldly go on Starleaper Two, that's probably going to earn her a lot of new achievements for all the discoveries they'll make.