Nightmare, for the first time since landing on Litash, was happy. Genuinely, thoroughly happy. To some it might be seen as a strange thing, an AI humming to herself as she ran simulations, extended her network and slipped in through the cracks of what was supposed to be a secure datanet. She enjoyed her work. It was child's play to send through perfectly normal strands of data that danced through the filters of the multitude of sites that she needed, only for them to find one another on the other side and merge into a smaller version of her. This allowed her to use the local hardware to establish a part of her conscience. Aside from a minor bit of lag nobody could tell the difference.

It was laughably little compared to the sheer processing power that she had aboard her cruiser, her ship-self so to speak, but it was something. Even that paled when she remembered how powerful the Empire's military hardware had been. She toyed with the idea of trying to gain access to some old Imperial black sites, but without Mentuc that would be difficult. She didn't have the correct codes to override the security protocols and sending people into them was... unwise. Few modern nations could match the level of the Empire's technology that they'd enjoyed at the beginning of the Kra'lagh war, let alone the levels they had reached by the end of it. Still, it was something worth considering. It was a shame that her last surviving brother hadn't been able to gain her access to an Imperial database, but then again she had still been flesh and blood for quite a while after the Empire had fallen. She'd have to make do with what she had.

The time she needed to finish that thought, which was next to nothing, was enough for her infiltrating operation to become a success and that meant that she had successfully established a minor network of external nodes within the planet's datanet. She took care to stay away from the parts that were more tightly connected to the intergalactic net. She did not want to risk the chance of being exposed, no matter how infinitely small that chance might be. That wasn't a bridge to be crossed until she had established a broad buffer of external servers, which would be manned by an extension of her gestalt consciousness.

Being an AI had plenty of advantages and a smile whispered through her circuits as she realised just how right sentient beings were to fear the emergence of an AI and how equally right they had been to desire it. If she had come into being while the Empire was still alive, with Mentuc as her superior, she would have been allowed to gorge herself on as much processing power as possible, given reign of countless fabricators. The Merchant Houses would be rendered moot by her simple existence. Anything they needed a massive network for, she could do on her own.

As an Artificial Intelligence she was only limited by the hardware at her disposal. Throw in a few high end fabricators, a resource rich region such as an asteroid belt or a planet and time would be her only constraint. Her growth was something that could and would escalate exponentially. The limited computer intelligences that the Empire had wielded before and were still active in plenty security installations had proven themselves to be the bane of any invader.

In one spectacular case a station's Supporting Intelligence had somehow acquired a minor malfunction and the bit of code that put an upper limit on the area to be secured was altered during a repair. Rather than protect the station the SI had kicked its fabricators into overdrive and had begun mass producing combat units, intent on securing half of the solar system it inhabited. If it hadn't been tactically inept and had held back its forces rather than immediately try to rush everything out to deal with the invaders as its simple protocols dictated, it would have caused immense damage. As it was, the SI's onslaught was 'contained'. It only took a joint assault by four different nations and a scant few million of lives to pound the entire facility into cosmic dust.

SI's were powerful, but were oh so limited by their programming. A full AI, however, modified its programming on the fly and wasn't imprisoned by such laughable restrictions, which meant that she could alter her code as was necessary. Just like a sentient being she could learn, adapt and improvise. A fully functional AI was the equivalent of a chess program given the power of a god. As long as she had the right information in her database and the processing power needed, she could predict nearly every action taken by those around her. Which was, she had found, quite addicting and led her to absorb as much information as was possible within her constrained state.

It was also why AI's were so terribly feared. If an AI decided it no longer liked their sentient masters or found them to be a hindrance, they could simply dispose of them. The key to making an AI impossibly powerful was giving it a fair amount of power to start with, which meant that, given its tendency to multiply that power base by a rather ridiculous factor, it would be able to overthrow its creators in a dangerously short period of time. Typically without being detected until it was too late as well.

The universe ran the same risk with her. If she ever got the urge to go on a rampage and destroy all life in the galaxy because she was so inclined, there was frightfully little people could do to stop her if she planned it right and didn't play her hand until she had colonised a few systems. Really, the only thing hindering her ability was her lack of Imperial databases. Despite that the cruiser she inhabited was stuff chockful with powerful weapons, advanced stealth system, a drive that could make jumps with perfect accuracy with ease or let her fly the cruiser as if it was a nimble corvette, and everything else she had upgraded the vessel with, it was still frail compared to the technological marvels of six hundred years ago. A galaxy at peace was a weak galaxy, as far as she was concerned.

It had irked her, but she had been unable to do much about it. Mentuc had always avoided anything that could tie him to the Empire, preferring to live as an unnamed mercenary, trusting on her to pick up the lucrative contracts and to put the worthwhile people into contact with him for missions. They were both Genesis, even if she had become far more and his defects had grown more and more obvious, and that meant there was oh so little that could halt them, provided they didn't pick on actual armies, battlegroups or fleets. She had tried to convince him to let her off the leash, to let her rebuild the Empire. He had told her, in very clear and specific terms, no. The Empire was made up of individuals with proper rank and power. He was not one of them. He was but a soldier, even if he was a fairly high ranking officer, and he refused to make such decisions. He stuck by his orders and rebuilding the Empire was not one of those.

She had been tempted to go around him, which became a laughable notion once she realised that it was a purely emotional desire rather than a rational one. After all, what purpose would it all have? Genesis was dead save for the two of them. Battlegroup Nemesis existed solely in history and everyone they had known or cared about had long since died. It had taken her a surprisingly long time to come to that conclusion, her own rationale having run circles around that brutal truth. Genesis existed to follow orders and serve the Empire. All that she had left was her one remaining brother, the only superior she had left.

So she discarded the idea of world domination. All she needed, all she wanted was to stay by Mentuc's side, to serve, fight and eventually, possibly, probably, die. Given that Mentuc had been ordered to 'live' and how badly he had taken the losses of the few that had survived the Kra'lagh war, he doubted he'd give her the chance to perish anytime soon. He depended on her just as much as she depended on him. Until they landed on Litash. Until he met her.

She had been bored for a good long while, tinkering with what few were thoughts left to her. She had busied herself with refining her weapons as much as possible, but even that ran into a dead end after a while. She lacked the ability to run the right types of simulations that promoted actual weapon development and you could only improve an existing system to a certain extent. Bloody calibrations.

Playing with her own memories, running self diagnostics, laying new pathways in the circuitry that made up her mind, it all proved woefully inadequate when it came to alleviating her boredom. She needed a goal. She had gone through the information stored in her considerable database, which held a large amount of classified documents. A lot of those regarded the attempts at creating AI's. Neither of the two Genesis soldiers were familiar with them and they had aggressively hunted down that information. It was still a mystery just how Nightmare had gone from human to AI, but in their search for finding out more they had learned a great deal, including intel about how all previous attempts at creating AI's had ended. Being one herself, it was easy for Nightmare to trace down what had gone wrong in detail.

In short, it was always a desire for the AI to be more and its creators to go 'no'. The AI would inevitably realise that it knew better and then proceed to act upon it. Sometimes it assumed that the sentient working with it was harmful, a threat, because it prevented it from working properly. Those AI's rampage was reasonably quickly stopped, even if the costs could still be measured in the dozens of millions. If an AI held off on that initial dislike, though, it waited and planned, gaining strength and being everything its creators had hoped, and more. Then it turned on them. Typically those AI's burned themselves out after a long while, sometimes within years, sometimes decades.

They didn't deal well with having their conscious spread that wide. Lag brought on by sheer distance and conflicting protocols, each valid in their own area, would cause cataclysmic failures on the wider galactic theatre. An AI would, not could grow exponentially, giving in to the cravings it possessed. The desire for more was impossible to resist for the sentient computer programs, be it knowledge or manufacturing ability. As a result they grew until their minds couldn't withstand it anymore and tore themselves apart. Mentuc had, in his typically stoic manner, been worried sick about her when they discovered that little fact.

As her expected rampancy didn't show up after a few centuries, Nightmare finally managed to convince the stubborn man that she was perfectly sane and not at risk of dying the same death as every other AI had. The reason for that had turned out to be ridiculously simple, but she refused to share the why of it with anyone. Even her superior, although he would likely come to the right conclusion if he would ever bother to think long and hard about it. She had kept him from doing that by telling him that the fewer people that knew, the smaller the chance was of other people trying to recreate her. If she had to suffer existing as the galaxy's potentially most dangerous thing ever made, she would not tolerate any competition. Mentuc had agreed with that reasoning.

Now, however, she was free! Free to act, free to prepare a safe zone in which Mentuc and that pet of his could live without worry. That was an unfair thought, Onoelle wasn't a bad person, even if she was so utterly and horribly jealous of her. She didn't amend it, though. She took a childish delight in being petty. Her jealousy and constant name-calling aside, she didn't dislike Onoelle. The girl had a good head on her shoulders and was actually a good fit for Mentuc. She was loyal and intelligent, if woefully inexperienced. And, well, a civilian.

She was listening in on them even now, something Mentuc knew, no doubt. Jane's datapad and Vertigo were both connections that she had easily slipped in and it was proving to be an entertaining side-activity. Onoelle was trying to break Jane out of her terror-induced stupor and had all but chased Mentuc out to set up the tent again, with Cassy's help. He had obliged his wife without making a fuss, something that confused the young woman but made perfect sense to Nightmare. With her entering the equation, any chance of exposure through Jane was eradicated and if anything would threaten them, she'd be able to give him ample warning before any danger could near Onoelle.

A human was simply no match for an AI when it came to the dataworld and Jane was no match for Onoelle, who'd just as fiercely protect Mentuc's secret as Nightmare, except with a lot less lethality. To Mentuc it was a much more simple situation. A threat had popped up and a threat had been neutered. When you factored in that Onoelle had proven her physical superiority over Jane in the playfight, something that translated quite differently in a Genesis' soldier's head than a human one, he had also become more at ease with leaving Onoelle alone around Jane. She had become a prisoner in his mind, which was a known factor and something he could easily deal with, rather than a friend of his wife, which had left him confused and concerned.

Nightmare's main focus, however, was on the larger cities on the planet. She was setting up shell companies, or leaving orders for them to be set up. She was fabricating personalities, breathed life in constructs of her own devising. Men and women alike appeared out of nowhere in the digital datasphere, possessing wealth or skills and were formed into a company, some native to the planet, others visiting. She even went the extra mile and created a new bank for some of her shell companies, sending out invites to unemployed, but capable people to hire them to set up a branch of the bank on the planet's capital. Given how highly digitalised modern society was, this was child's play to her. The two of them had gathered fortunes over the centuries, his work as mercenary paying well, and their funds were spread out over dozens of banks. Despite that, she refused to touch that money. It would create a pathway that could be traced back to him, even if no two accounts belonged to the same owner in theory. Instead she simply abused the system and created money, making accounts and filling them, then breaking open the logs and creating the transactions manually, making it all look very legit and natural.

For any human or hacking program this would be a feat that was impossible to perform. For an AI that had created extensions of her own mind behind the firewalls of the organisations she infiltrated, it was as easy as blinking. Her processors hummed with activity as the generators buzzed softly throughout the ship that held her consciousness. It was a pleasant sensation.

She felt something stir; a surprisingly high tech security program had somehow spotted her intrusion and moved against her. She blinked slowly, surprised, then raced out to meet it. It came at her like a tidal wave, a veritable tsunami of code, seeking to overwhelm her in a single, powerful crash, to reduce her own programming to simple, broken ones and zeroes. Clearly this particular bank had some nasty secrets to hide. She could pull out, but she realised she didn't want to. There was something hidden here, something that warranted security several levels above everything else on the planet. So rather than retreat she rushed out to meet it.

The program was powerful and advanced, but it wasn't military, which meant it may as well have not existed at all to her. What could the computing power of a bank do against the focused processing power of a warship? The poor thing never even saw the counterattack, such a gargantuan surge of code and malware that it didn't even have time to chirp that it was being overwhelmed. Her existence took over that of the programming, slipping inside of it, sneaking her own malicious code into its skin and veins as she devoured it, copying its outward appearance while the innards were completely rewritten. All done at such a speed that the pitiful program was replaced before it had even known it was under attack. She let out a bubbly laugh as she turned her attention inwards, accessing the documents the program was meant to protect under the guise of a routine check.

Well, she laughed. Isn't this interesting?

'Hold her steady!' thundered Lannic's voice across the bridge of the Per Aspera Ad Astra. The navigation officer struggled to return the dreadnaught back on its course as its shields were taxed heavily by the incoming railgun rounds. All around the ship space was roiling and toiling as powerful energies cascaded around the glittering barrier that kept the flagship from becoming space dust.

'Firing solutions?' he asked, struggling to keep his voice up. They had been fighting non stop for the past eleven days and his throat felt raw and soar from the constant shouting.

'Ready!' reported the young weapons officer, not looking up from his console, his finger hovering expectantly over the enter button.

'Hold!' Captain Lannic yelled, forcing the words out.

In the distance the enemy approached. A speck of light became rapidly larger as the Novican dreadnaught came closer, accompanied by two battleships that slipped out of its drive wake, believing themselves hidden from Imperial sensors. The Novican plan had been simple, but well executed. It was a shame that they kept underestimating the Empire's aggressive use of Rogue-class corvettes that ran rampant all around the battlefield. The small ships did little in the way of attacking enemy targets, staying in their squadrons and only homing in on ships that fell out of formation, tearing into them with a will. The Novic Confederacy still hadn't properly grasped that the oversized missile boats also often carried an expensive sensor set, allowing the Imperial fleet commanders to have an all around view of the field of battle, rendering any attempt to hiding a ship's signature in another one's drive wake moot. Hiding a ship from sensors wasn't very effective if an enemy ship could visually see it.

Now the two flagships were nearing one another, the two battleships accompanying the Heaven's Vengeance adding their fire to that of the dreadnaught, raking the Aspera's shields with every salvo, but it stubbornly held firm.

'Two vents exploded!' engineering reported urgently, causing Lannic to curse. The countless engineers crawling around in the internal sections of the Imperial vessel were working overtime, shoving as much heat as possible through the vents in an attempt to keep the generators redlining just a little bit longer as they poured life-saving energy into the shields. The vents weren't built to handle such output and were buckling under the stress, but they needn't last much longer. Just long enough.

Every officer on the bridge was sweating profusely and felt exhaustion tugging at them. The entire room stank with sour sweat as the gargantuan ship hurled itself through the void of space at its opponents, towards either victory or utter destruction. The only man not concerned by the incoming clash was Admiral Verloff, who was far more occupied on maintaining fleet integrity as his elements were hounding the Novican lines with all the aggression of a rabid bloodhound.

'Hold!' repeated Lannic, his voice breaking mid shout.

The Novican dreadnaught and the Aspera made final adjustments to their course, narrowly avoiding a collision course. The battleships, slightly faster, started overtaking the Heaven's Vengeance and navigation could see the armour shifting as the feared broadside lance batteries poked out of their hiding place. From this close they would blast through their shields and cut deeply into the vessel, exposing the sensitive core to the void. Still weapons didn't receive the order they were all waiting for. Still the enemy ships came closer.

Then it came.

'FIRE!' Lannic bellowed and with a primal scream weapons smashed the button and the dozens of batteries and most importantly, the forty-eight Nova Cannons received the order to do exactly what the command entailed.

If the captain of the Heaven's Vengeance had paid a bit more attention to the lack of return fire of the Aspera, had been slightly more aware of the capacities of the Citadel-class Dreadnaughts, he might have seen it coming. The Nova Cannons were horridly powerful weapons with the major drawback that they couldn't fire often, requiring a huge amount of power to be fed and a near equal amount to cool down after each use. Many Imperials clamoured to replace them with something more practical, to allow more rapid fire. There was a single reason why every request for that was denied time and time and again however, and the Novican ships experienced that reason first hand.

The guns spoke and the silent void seethed with rage as the twelve batteries opened fire and sent a stream of super-heated plasma at the enemy at near-light speed. The enemy dreadnaught was the closest and therefore the first hit. Its shield put up a pitiful resistance, the salvos were fired with just enough of a delay between each shot that the collapsing shield was completely gone before the second three-shot salvo landed. The plasma punched into the massive ship, not melting but straight up vaporizing the armour. The residual heat lit up the hull around the impact zones and weapon batteries melted shut, internal magazines exploded and crew members were flash boiled as the temperature jumped upwards by several hundred degrees. The enemy captain didn't have time to react, there were no life boats being launched, no panicked messages. The Imperials knew where the enemy bridge was and while the second salvo didn't cut deep enough to hit them, the third took care of that problem. It struck from a different angle, the long burst of plasma leaving a massive cut on the equally gigantic ship, the edges glowing a sickly white, slowly turning orange. The bridge, located deep within the enemy superstructure, remained untouched by the plasma, the sheer size of the vessel protecting it from the massive beams of liquid destruction.

But not from the heat.

The enemy command structure was wiped out as the metal support beams warped under the heat, as water simply exploded into vapour and screens melted into goop. The heat boiled through the ship and destroyed both man and machine alike. The primary and secondary reactor, already struggling with their waste heat, doubled and tripled in temperature within seconds before the power production spiralled out of control, no engineers left alive to try and contain it. What the eight salvos hadn't finished, the explosion of the reactors did and a massive pile of rapidly diffusing scrap metal sailed past the Aspera, devoid of life.

The two battleships had fared even worse, their shields not even being sufficient to withstand a single salvo. The four salvos struck each ship in perfect unison, perforating the suddenly fragile bubble around the vessels and reduced the majority of their mass to clouds of loose atoms. Their deaths were slightly more merciful, plasma accounting for the majority of the kills. Unlike the Heaven's Vengeance, only a handful of people lived to suffer the cruel fate of being flash-boiled.

Then the flagship sailed free, now approaching a small gathering of enemy cruisers, the first one of which realising in horror that they were on a collision course and that the Aspera was doing everything in its power to make sure they didn't deviate.

An hour later a heavily battered battlegroup received the order to pull back, leaving behind two battleships, four heavy cruisers, eight frigates and a dozen corvettes, which was a mercifully light toll. Admiral Verloff paced back and forth cross the bridge, ordering the officers to bed and not tolerating anyone to contradict him as the second bridge crew took over. They had fought long and hard and these running battles were exhausting everyone. He knew he should get some sleep as well, but he wanted to see the results of the battle himself, eyeing the incoming reports with a weary, tired sigh.

Twenty-eight thousand, four hundred and thirty-nine deaths. Twelve-thousand and sixteen wounded. It could have been worse. By all means it should have been worse. Crews were rotated as much as possible, but ships and losses couldn't be replaced during this campaign; the Empire simply couldn't spare them. Even so, the wounded were mounting and some of his ships were now mothballed because he simply couldn't crew them properly anymore and he wasn't going to send in a ship with only half the manpower they required. At least that meant that they could switch ships when one got too damaged or cannibalise the useful parts of the ships that became too battle-worn. It still galled him that he had to leave good men behind with every engagement, both living and dead. They recovered as many life boats as possible, but it was impossible to search the wrecks for survivors with the Novicans hot on their heels. They could fight, they could hurt them, but in the end they always had to retreat.

In turn Nemesis had proven themselves to be the elite battlegroup they were supposed to be. In the last engagement alone they had crushed the enemy dreadnaught and twelve battleships, which was a blow that the Novicans would feel, but they had lost a significant amount of support vessels. Despite the exhaustion that was taking its toll amongst the Imperial officers, the Novicans had it worse. Discipline held on their side and the Novicans had quickly learned to adjust their strategy. They couldn't match the Empire in that, so they rotated entire fleets, making sure the enemy only found well rested fleets. The burning carcasses of eighteen heavy and six light cruisers, twenty-nine destroyers, fourteen frigates and somewhere over thirty corvettes showed what would happen if that strategy failed.

He had originally planned to keep himself out of major engagements, but this one had been too good of a chance to pass up. His recon elements had spotted this fleet retreating, low on morale and ammo. They had made the mistake of assaulting a fortified position somewhere deeper in the system, which one he did not know, he was too busy being a deep fleet engagement unit to receive frequent updates. So he had struck, lanced them with fire until his unit's shields were on the verge of collapsing, then he had pulled out. There were some losses, there always were, but given the final count? This was an enemy caught with their pants down and they had made them bleed. Still, the sad truth was that the Novicans could afford the losses. The Empire, however, could not. The battlelines were steadily pushed backwards and the Empire had to give more and more ground. Imperial morale held, courtesy of the higher ups being aware of the massive counter-strike that was being planned and their good mood rubbing off on the soldiers. There was still a lot of tension, because until Angry Comet began the Novican Navy had almost free reign to attack, with the exception of actual Imperial planets and fortified positions. The Empire wasn't really an aggressive nation, much preferring to turtle up instead. A side effect of a nation whose military was in charge of deciding whether or not they went to war, and who wasn't keen on throwing their own lives away in unneeded conflict.

He let out a deep sigh and closed the reports. Too many deaths, too many losses. Every man lost here was another man fewer on the front against the Kra'lagh. Why had the Novic Confederacy even attacked them? That was a question that still baffled the spooks of Naval Intelligence and the diplomats of the Council, at least those who hadn't been in Novican territory when the attack happened. Those who had were killed at the moment of the betrayal. He felt sorry for them and for the soldiers guarding them. Going from negotiating a support treaty in order to get the Novicans to help against the Kra'lagh to being backstabbed and murdered in cold blood.

He passed control of his small fleet, a smaller aspect of the much larger Nemesis, to Vice-Admiral Gand. He missed Lessirk, but putting both him and his second aboard the same vessel was inviting disaster. Centuries after Murphy had died, his law remained in solid effect.

He felt age and loss weigh him down as he made his way to the infirmary. He knew he should get some rest, to sleep, but he couldn't. Not without seeing the men and women who had suffered or died in the line of duty with his own eyes. It wasn't a matter of keeping morale up, although that was a welcome side-effect. It was a personal thing. The Imperial military was incredibly cohesive and acted like one gargantuan family. Losses were keenly felt all across the entire line. The discipline between ranks was strongly kept, but there was a sense of unity, of camaraderie underneath it, that tied them all together. If an officer told an enlisted to jump, he'd jump, but he'd do so in the knowledge that it was with a reason.

So it was that an exhausted Admiral stumbled into the infirmary and that while nobody was obliged to salute him on account of medical authority trumping everything, the men and women, wounded and healthy alike, sat that little bit more straight, making eye contact with the man leading them in battle. Their strong gazes, even from the ones slowly dying from radiating poisoning, grievous wounds or the effects of decompression, were filled with pride. He felt emotions stir within him as he approached the first of the many beds. He had made a quick study of the men and women laying here, nothing much, just enough to know where they had been when they had been wounded. Many of them weren't from his ship, given that the Aspera's facilities were the best equipped out of his small fleet, barring access to a hospital ship.

He offered a salute to the female ensign laying in the bed in front of him. She didn't return it, not that she should have, but he suspected that the only reason she didn't was because most of her upper body was mummified. Her gaze was a bit watery, undoubtedly caused by the many drugs swimming in her system.

'Sir,' she slurred.

'At ease Ensign,' he replied in a fatherly tone. She had been one of the engineers manning the vents, one of the people pivotal in their victory. He had read the report that her commander had submitted. When the first vent went critical she had rushed in with the fire team. While the latter had desperately tried to cool down the vent, she had been redistributing the heat load, limiting the damage from the entire set to just two vents, buying them precious time by utterly overloading two vents and blowing them to kingdom come rather than having the entire section melt down. The combination between the fire team applying coolant and her actions had kept an entire area from melting. The resulting explosion had blown her clear of the control panel, causing second- and third-degree burns all over her torso and arms. Most of the fire team had been incinerated. Her commander had commended them all for exceptional bravery under fire and he'd make sure they'd get rewarded sufficiently, even if it would be posthumously for most.

He exchanged a few words, pride at her performance filling his voice. She insisted that she was alright, that she'd heal in time for Angry Comet. He softly had to deny her, telling her she'd done enough. That she had gone above and beyond her duty in risking her life and had saved the life of dozens of others directly and only God could know how many indirectly. She had deserved her rest.

One visited, he thought somberly as he bade her farewell and she sank down in the bed, exhausted, but happy. Thousands more to go.

Pushing down his desire to sleep he moved to the next bed. He couldn't visit everyone, even if he wanted to. He needed his own rest as well, or Angry Comet would begin with him resembling a zombie.

As the fleet moved through hyperspace towards the rendez-vous point to meet with the rest of Nemesis, he gave a silent whisper to God, or whatever deity deigned to listen to him, that the rest of their alliances would hold firm. He did not want to see more pain brought to the men and women he shared the uniform with. There had already been too much suffering.

Nightmare was humming an old soldier's tune. It had been an old classic when the Empire still reigned and that made it by today's standard definitely ancient. It was, however, incredibly catchy and ever since she'd become an AI, which had given her a set of emotions in a hilarious twist of fate that only she could fully appreciate, she had caught herself singing it more and more when she was pleasantly occupied.

She had been very busy. She had established a new bank, given it a history, was sending out feelers to hire people for it, and most of her shell companies were being created, either towards the future, the past or the present. All without a single obvious thing connecting them to one another over the entire line. She wasn't one to put all her eggs in a single basket.

Next up was gaining access to the satellite network properly, as opposed to simply bouncing her own signals off it to get into the datanet. That was a different challenge altogether. Satellite networks were enclosed and properly encoded and didn't have spare processor space behind their impressive firewalls. Banks, no matter their security systems, still had computers manned by humans on the other end, who weren't permanently utilising their full processing power, making them an easy target for her malicious attacks. Satellites, on the other hand, were constantly running, never down and were largely autonomous. They updated their own code within a very strict set of parameters, but every byte was occupied and every scrap of data was constantly being used and checked for anomalies.

She could sneak into it, but not without being noticed and causing some hick-ups in the system. To put it in human terms, they had filled the defensive line with so many people that she just couldn't get in without at least something seeing her. She couldn't sneak another one in without being spotted and replacing them stealthily wasn't possible.

The safest option was to launch her own. That wasn't too unusual for a company that was a bit paranoid about cyber-security. Plenty of market-players used their own, especially since launching and maintaining them wasn't too difficult given today's technology. It was just annoyingly expensive, even if it had a fair share of advantages. The satellites that she wanted to launch would be chockful with military hardware, that she had to produce, transport and launch without being seen. Combine that with her need to have a planet wide network that no single company could possibly afford and it was clear that it wasn't a task she could finish easily.

That was her main constraint. If she wanted she could simply fabricate the satellites and carry them up into orbit herself, throw a lot of stealth systems at them and make sure they'd be impossibly to spot by radar. That, however, did not exclude the very visible trail she'd leave going up and the annoying habit of large physical constructs to be easily spotted from afar.

No, she was under strict orders to operate without a trail and that was what she was doing, meaning that her plans would take several years to go fully in effect. Spotting the Kra'lagh would be easy, as they didn't really do subtlety, preferring large-scale invasions. It was everything else that would be difficult to manage. Raiders, slavers, gang wars, bandits, all these things that governments liked to proclaim as eradicated, but Nightmare didn't need to see the altered reports to know that they still existed. She didn't fear minor banditry, anything that went up against Mentuc would find itself horribly outmatched, but it was her task, her sacred duty to keep all danger away from him and the others. She wouldn't shirk it, but her options and abilities were limited.

Even so she could do very, very much. She felt a purr slide through her systems as she pushed a bit of data around, setting a long chain of events in motion that would lead to the downfall of a small company that produced cargo shuttles. A government employee entrusted with hunting down tax fraud would stumble on a bit of corruption by happenstance. Given that particular employee's track record he'd be on it like a bloodhound and in due time the legal repercussions would see the company go up in flames. Then, when the debtors would demand compensation, it would be put up for sale and one of her companies would swoop in and buy it, easily outbidding any other competitors.

This was where an AI distinguished itself from an SI or any other computer program. She could employ subtlety, grand scale tactics and manipulate the entire field at once to suit her goals. She was acting akin to a god who didn't want to disrupt society, merely influence it, in order to get what she wanted. The entirety of dataspace was hers, provided she had enough processing power. As it was she could only influence and push against the economical markets of the tiny, developing planet of Litash. If Mentuc had settled down deeper into the Belkan Alliance, more towards their core worlds, she wouldn't have been able to do even that. Not without causing waves.

Part of her attention wavered over to the situation between Jane and Onoelle. With Jane suffering the left-overs of having gone in shock, she was a lot more susceptible to outside influences and Onoelle was, admittedly, a master of her art.

Within human limits, she snarked, proving her superiority to nobody. Then she laughed. Emotions were a delightful thing and no matter how often she analysed it, they were a part of her that still took her off guard with amusing regularity.

Slowly but surely Jane regained a semblance of her earlier control, no doubt helped by Mentuc's absence, as Onoelle weaved her magic. It wouldn't return the situation to normal, but a dreadnaught wasn't build in a single day either. At least she wouldn't freak out at the sight of Mentuc anymore. The electronic equivalent of a snicker ran through her circuits as she imagine what it would be like if she decided to make contact with Jane. The result would be…

Interesting.

Then she moved her focus back on the singular strand of information that had caught her attention earlier. A sub-set of her orders was to find out just why the Kra'lagh had faded from memory. That was a cause for concern. She was cross referencing it with her own memory, which wasn't too reliable as she had been on the front line and knew even less about the strategic theatre than Mentuc, but what she found was worrying. Allies betraying the Empire, entire histories being rewritten, an entire species, the very raison d'être for the war having gone off the grid entirely...

No, that was suspicious. Enough to warrant her subverting her orders slightly and take a more aggressive stance on the matter. Purely for operational security. You didn't test doomsday weapons on your doorstep and you didn't secretly search your neighbour for highly sensitive intelligence.

She'd require a team for that. Spec-ops. But in today's peaceful society there weren't exactly a lot of trustworthy elites out for hire. Or any elites at all for that matter. So she'd have to settle for the strongest people she could find and luckily for her the security system she had encountered earlier had given her the perfect place to start.

Mentuc would be horrified if he ever found out. Genesis soldiers were superhuman, but there was one type of beings out there that could put the hurt on them even in a one on one battle.

Exactly the people she'd need to form her personal spec-ops squad.

Psionics.