Chapter 51: Triumph

The Trade Federation was finished. Roughly forty percent of the company’s physical assets were seized, their liquid assets drained into my coffers with what little remained frozen, and the records found of all their evil deeds.

Already their subsidiaries were attempting to break off. Other parts were going into immediate bankruptcy. Crews were seizing their own vessels, turning them into authorities willing to pay a portion of the ships value in prize money. Some captains were taking off, going into Hutt space, or elsewhere, just beyond the Republic’s grasp.

The rats were fleeing the sinking ship.

We’d won.

Of course, I didn’t think that this was the end of it. The dark-sider on Tatooine indicated that forces (or Forces) beyond a shady mega-corp were at work. He was still out there, and I doubted that he’d forgotten me or Jon. Not to mention the dark-sider’s master, assuming he wasn’t working as a mercenary or bounty hunter.

But it would be much harder to hit Naboo in the future. For the next decade, a half-million strong detachment of soldiers and sailors from the Ailon Nova Guard would be helping to secure the system. And by the time the Nova Guard was cycling out, my own forces would be cycling in.

No, I suspected that if someone were intent on making trouble, either in general or for the Republic, they’d do it elsewhere.

My actions had had something of a destabilizing effect. The mega-corps were on notice. Their spending on corporate security was increasing massively every day, and the stock price for reputable private military contractor (PMC) companies and military industries was soaring as both irate governments and oppressive companies considered more direct action.

After a final victory parade, it was all over.

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Following the retaking of Naboo, I had a load of shit to take care of.

Distributing the loot took months; I pretty much sold off all of my portion of the seized equipment. I only got about a third of the theoretical value, but I just didn’t want to have to take care of it, or risk any backdoors in the codes or other surprises people might hit me with.

It wasn’t like money was a thing for me, after all, and even if I did have to care about money, I had somewhere in excess of seven point five trillion credits after totaling up my haul. I could buy basically anything. And I did.

I wanted to establish my own PMC, a private military company, to be my presence in the Star Wars plane. I was familiar with Revan’s adventures, after all; as epic as they were to watch, conflict of that scale was a pain in the ass to be a part of. I was a crazily powerful mage, already at the “planetary destruction” level, and quickly climbing in power. Plus, I was, as far as I could tell, biologically immortal. So the question became, what did I do with my power.

Now, I was not a saint. I didn’t want to make peoples’ lives perfect; in fact, I was of the belief that struggle is part of what made a person, tempered them. Nor was I selfless; I wanted to live well, with wealth and power and minions. But I wasn’t above (or below) being benevolent. I had plans to liberate the enslaved and oppressed, both on Planetos and in the Star Wars Galaxy.

But to do that, my to-do list was pretty large. I wanted ships designed to use magic from the keel up, as well as visually similar versions for my general mercenary crews, and both natural and summoned forces to crew them. I wanted to figure out how to get technology to work in other dimensions, or figure out work-arounds. I wanted to come up with some sort of mind-enchantment interface for my people to use, as well as mind-machine and machine-magic interfaces. I wanted to figure out how to make purely techno-magical spirits based on droid minds. And I wanted to develop automated enchanters to apply all the upgrades without my attention.

Those were only the technical challenges.

One of the big issues with magic and ships is that there is no background mana in space. So I needed either long-range links to planets which did have mana, or to create live-ships that generated their own. I preferred the second of these options; it was just tidier, plus it didn’t leave vulnerable planets as difficult to protect power sources. That meant I needed designers who were skilled at building habitats.

But since I was building warships, I needed ship designers. Further, I needed a lot of ship designers. I wanted ships ranging in size from fifty meter long patrol-boats, all the way up to eight kilometer long dreadnoughts. Hells, in the future I wanted to build ships capable of holding entire nations worth of people in civilian comfort. My largest ship, what I was calling a “planet class” was slated to come in at around a hundred-twenty-eight kilometers long. With an internal deck area of ninety million square kilometers, it could support a population of up to ninety billion souls at maximum capacity.

Nor would a single ship design suffice for each size. I wanted all the varieties. Apart from dedicated civilian Liveships, I wanted general combat ships designed for the battle-line. Lancers, with a focus on longer ranged weapons like lasers. Sabres using mid-ranged beam weapons. Brawlers, designed to get up close and slug it out. Escorts with a large number of lighter weapons to take out fighters, missiles and the like. Missile and torpedo ships. Destroyers with super-heavy spinal weapons to hunt enemy capital ships. Carriers with swarms of drones, fighters and bombers. Assault ships, designed to carry out orbital assaults on ground targets or massive space-structures. Fast scouts and couriers. Stealth ships, Q-ships designed to blend into civilian shipping, raiders to operate long-term behind enemy lines. Armed merchant Indiaman ships to carry goods, transports to carry marines and soldiers, and support ships to carry out repairs, mine minerals and the like.

That was just for ships. I also needed fighters, bombers, gunships, landing craft, tanks, armored personnel carriers, power armor, un-powered armor, and weapons for all of the above.

And, since people I simply hired weren’t going to cut it with regards to loyalty, I needed minimally magical versions of all of the above so that the people I properly recruited, rather than simply summoning, could carry out operations too.

To actually use the equipment, I needed people. Crews, engineers, pilots, navigators, weapons officers, sensors officers, EW specialists, loadmasters, negotiators, pursers. I need officers and commanders, everything from junior NCO’s on up through full fleet admirals.

And I needed the infrastructure to support that. Not just physical; I needed administrators, educators, trainers, bureaucrats, and recruiters. To find the best people to serve as summoning templates, I needed competitions, and people to run those.

In short, I had a pretty fucking massive amount of work.

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Blissfully, most of it could be delegated. There were head-hunting firms that I hired to acquire the human resources I needed. I payed top credit, and hired the best. To make sure I got clever young folks too, I made sure to have numerous competitions. I hosted design competitions at various universities and digitally over planetary networks. Then I made sure to greet everyone personally, take a copy of their pattern, and created summoned groups to do the more sensitive or magically-oriented work in parallel.

I hired PMC’s myself, people that specialized in training modern military forces. I started to summon the limit of Paragons, eight hundred at first then more later, and sent many of them off to different war colleges and training courses set up within the Galaxy. As they came back, they often brought back promising recruits, whether just for a visit or on a more permanent arrangement – it didn’t make much difference to my summoning capability. And I made sure we cross-trained in the various specialties.

A few months in, and I had the bare-bones of a major research shipyard.

Even with all the delegation, it was a lot for me to keep track of. I had to interact a lot with the design teams, especially the summoned ones, on how exactly my magic worked and what it could do. It would have been impossible if it weren’t for my Blue mental upgrades. I may not have thought significantly better or differently than before my Awakening as a mage, but I sure as shit thought faster and more. But even thinking a dozen times as quickly and using pre-cog to jump between conclusions while skipping the actual thinking in between it was hard to keep up.

My work load only increased when I realized a little over a year after my arrival that I was no longer trapped in the Star Wars plane, and could once again access Westeros.

Harrenhal had done well in my absence and rule-by-Raven; there weren’t any real crises, thankfully. The ice-demons were still North of the Wall; I was planning on a culling once I had orbital support available. My army had expanded, the Hounds, Ravens and Horses doubling in population, while my military leaders had trained twenty regiments worth of reserve footmen. When my PMC was sufficiently set up, I was planning on establishing a training center on my lands and updating them to a more modern standard.

But the biggest part of my workload, and definitely the hardest, were my own projects; namely, the work I did developing new magic as needed for the grand plan.

So the first, and perhaps most important part of the magic was getting advanced technology to function regardless of dimension. Since a liveship generated a limited amount of mana, that mana was a finite resource. In other words, the more I used magic when unnecessary, the less magic I had available to both tap myself (assuming I bonded with the ships and got direct mana-taps working, both of which I planned on), and the less magic there was available for the shields, weapons, sensors, drives, etc.

Also, some parts could generate a lot of mana. Of all the mana sources, Red and Blue were the hardest to come across on a ship without access to high technology.

Green was available because I had the ships be as organic as possible. The ship grew food for the crew, absorbed internal light waste, recycled carbon dioxide into breathable air, and transported the ship’s water. Plus it meant that many parts of the ship could self-repair slowly even without magic; regeneration spells were, generally, more efficient than reconstruction ones as well. Enchanted exotic high-strength biomaterials were almost as good as enchanted exotic metals, and I’d modified the plants to naturally grow enchanted dragon-bone to provide mana-batteries, magical conductivity, and structural reinforcement.

Similarly Black was available from the natural reclamation of bio-waste. Ships were highly structured and orderly, thus there was a lot of White available.

Some Blue was available due to the complexity of the ship. But the computers, libraries, sensors and the like were great sources of Blue, and only available if high technology was too.

Red though was the worst. The best source of Red mana was a high-energy reactor. But those were high technology, and would fail if sent into a different plane with other physical laws.

After a lot of experimentation, I figured it out. It turned out that there was a White/Red equivalent to the Valyrianization process that bound in the original dimensional rules that a part functioned under while weakening any local rules that were different. I called it the “Dimensional Compatibility” enchantment.

I was pretty ecstatic to get that functioning. After, I seemed to be on a roll. Mind-magic interfacing was pretty easy; I just needed to have an enchantment that could read thoughts, and then have it operate triggers in a different enchantment. Feedback could be direct into the user’s mind, or indirect with lights, noises or the like. Machine-magic interfaces similarly were pretty simple, just operating by reading and sending signals through switches as needed.

Now, I make both of those sound really easy. They weren’t. It’s sort of like describing a lightbulb as a thin metal filament heated until it glows, but in a way that isn’t significantly damaging the filament. Sure, that’s technically correct. But if you told Edison it was that easy, he’d laugh at you and point out that there’s still a few hundred failed lightbulb experiments before you get it working. Mind-magic and magic-machine interfaces were kind of like that; a lot of failed experiments before I got it working. If it was the only thing I was working on, I might have achieved a reasonable version within a few months. Given all the other demands on my time, it took over a year, and another two before I was comfortable with their performance with most of the bugs ironed out.

Mind-machine interfaces, it turned out, already existed. The problem was that these neural interfaces just didn’t work that well. Few humans could keep up with the sensory overload. I needed an intermediary. Luckily, I already had an idea that should help. I was planning on making techno-magical spirits, or (techno) sprites as I decided to call them.

Basically, a sprite was what you get if you take a droid brain, and make it exist as a purely magical structure, capable of lightly interacting with human minds, machines, and spells. It took a full two years of study to figure out enough about how droids worked to get the spell working. Without mental acceleration, it would have been at least twenty. And even then, I generally needed a droid to serve as the template for my sprite construct. The spell worked on Blue for the ethereal mind with a bit of White for permanence and structure despite lacking physical form, though even then sprites still needed to be hosted by a human or sufficiently advanced computational device/droid.

But when I got the spell working, it was awesome. It opened so many doors. First, I had fully functional mind-machine interfaces, ones I could use not just with my own magically loyal forces, but anyone in my organization. And it didn’t just improve efficiency for pilots and the like; no, they drastically improved productivity for anyone working with computers. My designers were suddenly getting easily twice as much work done as the time it took for their CAD programs to get their ideas just right went from days to minutes, allowing them to focus on other parts of the problem.

I could put sprites in as controllers for magical drone ships, improving fighter performance, and as managers over individual weapons systems too. They managed my auto-enchanters, a lot of the administrative work, and could be loaded with astralized code, such as HUD aim-assist programs, functional programs like Word, Excel and CAD, … basically, they were fucking awesome.

Between the mind-machine-magic interface circle, I was finally able to give my summoned designers and engineers working on the magical ship products the ability to (even if minimally) modify enchantments. They were fucking inept compared to me, but they were thousands and I one; the fraction of my time spent troubleshooting small magical quirks went down exponentially, and I was much happier.

My own personal sprite, Jeeves, was a great assistance to everything I did. While I had auto-enchanters that could make sprites, and used those to generate the majority of the sprites that were used by my people, Jeeves had been a special project, made with the most advanced droids I could get my hands on.

The core of Jeeves’ personality was an FIII Footman, a model of droid last manufactured four centuries previous. They were designed to be the best possible assistant; valet, bodyguard, assassin, they did it all, and with the utmost loyalty. Short of HK-47, it was the best I could get, and I doubted HK’d agree to be my virtual secretary and assistant even if I could find him. Jeeves’ computational muscle came from the second part; a super-powerful AI I’d specially commissioned, but never activated.

I couldn’t actually create Jeeves straight out. The AI was too complex, the processing power too high. Instead, I flew into a part of empty space, somewhere I wouldn’t be disturbed. Then I constructed a massive twisted mass of dragon-bone in the three-dimensional projection of the spell-pattern I needed. That served as the support for the sprite creation spell, and after charging had enough extra mana that I could actually realize the spell. I could have literally glassed a planet with less energy.

It was a huge pain in the ass. But when it was done, I had Jeeves’ kernel, which I then enhanced with as strong a set of mental acceleration enchantments as I could manage. Jeeves was amazing, capable of truly stupendous levels of multi-tasking and modeling. I’ll admit freely, he pretty much ran my PMC while I was researching. And in a bit of a blow to the ego, the improvement was shocking.

I’d been tempted to call him Jarvis, or Sebastian, but decided to go with the classic name instead.

Techno-magical singularity and transhumanism. I was down for that.