Chapter 101: The Goal

Fleet Admiral Hunt had to hide a groan when she saw who was on the meeting schedule.

I wonder … how many people consider that man an omen of bad luck at this point? Every time I see him, there’s a disaster on the horizon.

It wasn’t a fair criticism; she knew that, but at the same time, she was pretty damn certain she’d walk out of it with some horrifying and/or scarring piece of information that would wind up changing the course of the war.

Usefulness did little to change the nature of a piece of news.

So, already braced for bad news, she sent her aide a quick message that she was ready, and through the door strode Dr. Isaac Thoma, the man looking uncharacteristically murderous as he made the [System] window before his eyes visible to her as well.

Seal Five

Blood-baptized Expansion (Capstone)

The only sapient being that exists in your world is you. All others have fallen. By your hands, no less … at least your existence as a hivemind fills the empty city with some semblance of life.

However, isn’t an eternally fixed population a little sad? Especially considering the current expected lifespan?

As such, this Capstone enables its bearer to expand their hive mind the same way the hive was earned: bloody expansion and genocide!

Every civilization wiped out will increase the maximum size of the network by one percent (next increase: ten million), grant the ability to create bodies off of a template based on the destroyed civilization, and add complete knowledge of its technology to the network’s knowledge base.

“Wonderful,” Hunt groaned.

“It’s going to be unbelievably slow to start with, but exponential growth is still exponential growth,” Thoma agreed.

“Well, that’s a problem too … but I’m more concerned with the ability to steal knowledge. Hive minds share a single mind by definition. One person’s worth of creativity without the ability to even bounce ideas off another sapient being will hamstring creativity. If our enemy can steal knowledge, however …”

“How much of quantum physics was discovered during the course of Einstein and Planck trying to torpedo each other’s thought experiments?” Thoma asked rhetorically, then sighed. “I suppose we could just try and avoid having any technologically advanced species be exterminated?”

“There is that …” Huunt rolled her eyes. Hardly befitting someone in her position, but it was just the two of them in here.

“Now, I think the next big question we have to ask ourselves is just what counts as ‘civilization’,” Thoma continued. “A lot of the indigenous people displaced during the age of colonization have done their best to find planets of their own. If each of those counts empowers the Bastard, we’re going to have quite the problem pretty soon.”

“We still don’t have the ships to meaningfully guard anything outside the Core,” Hunt pointed out, pulling up the relevant data on her console, then sighing in relief. “I won’t say it doesn’t stick in my craw that we have to keep our navy concentrated, but according to the latest census data, there is not a single ethnic group that has entirely relocated off-Earth.”

She paused and looked at the living weapon cosplaying as a scientist sitting across from her.

“I’d like you to be present when I explain this mess to the rest of high command.”

Thoma nodded.

“I’ll be … available. Just tell me when and where.”

***

You know, at the end of the day, Isaac had not been to very many of these meetings.

Military-adjacent ones? Yeah. The same went for ones that combined the military and government, various emergency gatherings and so on … but this had originally meant to be a purely navy high command.

A sea of uniforms, with more stars than the night sky. Actually, with how close Mercury was to the sun, and how many stars were outshone by the local one, that statement might even be halfway accurate … point was, this’d be interesting.

And, hopefully, let him tip things in humanity’s favor.

Because as things stood, he really could only see two options: either humanity beat back wave after wave of alien attacks and grew off that until the Bastard was crushed … or the limitless pool of manpower would eventually crush them into dust, one fleet at a time.

The massive conference room he now found himself in was probably the most overcomplicated and heavily enchanted one he’d ever been in, and that included the ones he’d designed for his own use.

Anyone would be heard perfectly and visible to everyone else no matter what, a central holotank that combined both technological and magical illusions and could all but read the users’ minds, remote access systems that could allow people to attend virtually even from the other end of the universe if necessary, and the location of the seats could be freely shuffled to allow for “private” discussions amidst the larger overall conversation.

There were also nameplates hovering above each seat, visible only to those who needed them. Or at least that was what he assumed to be the case, judging by the fact that the only people who’d been assigned one were ones he did not, in fact, know. As well as the fact that the only empty chair with one had been labeled “Dr. Isaac Thoma.” It was, surprisingly enough, right next to Hunt’s chair.

More and more people trickled in, some walking in through one of the numerous doors, others teleporting right next to their seats, others still manifesting in their chairs.

Some were showing up with coffee cups in hands, others were still doing work on tablets, and a Korean man Isaac only belatedly recognized as Admiral Park, the officer in charge of the navy’s research division, was doing his damnedest to cram a ration bar into his mouth before he reached his seat.

In other words, one could tell at a glance just how short a notice this affair had been called.

“Some new information has come to light,” Hunt began with no preamble, Rear Admiral Naiser not even having reached his chair yet, a smear of oil across the front of his uniform that he’d surely not even noticed. “We now know at least part of what motivated the Bastard to strike at Sol.”

Clearly, that was Isaac’s cue, so he once more shared the most immediately problematic prophecy of [Book of Seven Seals].

There was a long moment of shocked silence, each second stretching into infinity … yet even speaking entirely objectively, tracking the time with a mechanical clock rather than the highly influenceable internal variant, it still took a damn long time for it to be broken.

“Why didn’t they just go for the Dromon, if he needed to commit genocide for power?” someone suggested.

Which was a horrifying thought on multiple levels. Not only would the enemy strengthen himself, but a stone-age civilization that had well and truly gotten thrown into the deep end would be exterminated through absolutely no fault of their own. Isaac winced.

“Contact with us made the Dromon pretty paranoid, and Kiretas didn’t help the situation. Enough chieftains set up dead-man switches to punish even successful attacks that it would have taken a decent chunk of the force that hit us to guarantee victory,” a different admiral offered.

“That still doesn’t explain why they didn’t. If our enemy’s Capstone strengthens them through genocide … why not take the easiest way to strengthen themselves?”

“While it might be possible the Bastard is a fool, we can’t plan around the idea of our enemy being stupid,” the fleet admiral declared, the bone-deep tiredness weighing down every word. “The Capstone isn’t strong enough to guarantee victory with a single enhancement, so he’s decided to take us out of the war with their opening punch. And they might even have succeeded.”

Once the resultant chaos and arguments had died down, Hunt continued.

“People, we lost a sixth of the fleet, and a quarter of our industry. And Sol was attacked. Whether or not we will have enough ships deployable is a political issue, and therefore my battle to fight. And now we know our enemy’s purpose.

“ We need new options. Defensive plans that free up as many of our ships for offensive operations, and offensive plans for every potential configuration of available forces. Because playing the long game will cost us this war.”

“Does the navy or United Nations hold an Essence of Ymir in reserve?” Isaac offered. “Because if so, we could terraform Hellhole and offer to move enough of the Dromon there to ensure they’d survive a strike at their homeworld.”

Hellhole was a very appropriately named world, being Venus’ omnicidal cousin, utterly incompatible with even the most extreme forms of life, complex or single-celled; it did not matter, the place was, well, a hellhole. It also lacked any kind of off-planet resource that would have made it worth terraforming.

What it did have, however, was the right location. Because, barren as it was, Hellhole was located deep in its local star’s zone of interference, and said star was within catapult range of the entire Core.

Sure, terraforming it would require a World Item, and the difficulty in procuring those was downright ungodly, but it wasn’t like there were many planets with a fluorine-based biosphere in existence. In fact, the Dromon homeworld was the only one known to exist, including potentials spotted by extremely long-range observations via telescopes that covered not only the Milky Way but several other nearby galaxies.

“The emergency stash is for emergencies.”

Isaac did his best to avoid rolling his eyes, and took the next few seconds to try and come up with a response to that piece of intellectual brilliance without withering scorn bleeding into his tone … but there were people here whose place at the table was a lot less tenuous.

“And what, pray tell, would you consider this to be?” Rear Admiral Jayden Naiser outright glared across the table at the previous speaker, who had shrunk so far into his own chair that even with the table’s enchantment, Isaac was having a hard time getting a good look.

“I need a plan to make that happen while I get that World Item released,” Hunt ordered. “The Essence of Ymir has too many civilian applications to end up purely under military control.”

“At this point, our real concern should be an all-out attack. The description of our enemy’s capstone lets us infer the current size of our enemy’s hive as one billion. At twenty thousand per ship, that gives our enemy fifty thousand battleships, more in the case of designs that can go with smaller crew complements. That could easily provide enough firepower to steamroll anything we use to defend ourselves without taking losses that would put him under the minimum threshold.”

And here came Admiral Xiao, a man who was such a ray of sunshine that his reputation had spread even beyond the fleet’s gossip circle.

“Then he’d lose,” Admiral Miyazaki scoffed. “If the Bastard deploys enough of his bodies to a single location, it would open up certain strategic options that, while costly, would still be infinitely preferable over mankind’s extinction.”

And anyone who wasn’t aware of what said strategic options were right now would not be told the full story even if they asked. Isaac should be in that group ... but the only reason “knows too much for his own good” wasn’t his middle name was because it was too wordy.

Satisfaction killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back, and all that.

Beyond that, most plans that were made involved mass-production of missile satellites. Because those were great at making the enemy flinch back. Not so great at countering warp-type [Skills] being used to get out of their range, nor maintaining pressure afterwards. And once the satellites had shot themselves dry … that’d be that.

Great for delaying, but unless the enemy was an idiot (or in one hell of a time crunch), they were only so good at actually defending planets.

Isaac’s input wound up being minimal for the rest of the meeting; unfortunately, his area of focus lay well outside interstellar-age warfare. But he found himself very glad he’d attended nevertheless.