Location: Somewhere in the Thersian Enclave

Time: 46.5 GSY

ID: Revealer of Soul

Suppose I were forced to describe the experience of our trip through the wormhole. In that case, I’d tell you it was foregut churning and seizure-inducing. Every single moment of our centi-cycle journey had us feeling our nerves were boiling, with our chitin plates digging into our abdomen and thorax.

It was eternal, unending death, I tell you. I’d instead slice my face’s tendrils off before performing that again.

When I came to, most of the bridge crew was out of action in one way or another. Many had had their harnesses fail and had been spread as paste all across my bridge; the others simply had been knocked out from the inertial forces.

I attempted to bring my console online, only to get a response of an interesting smell of the air being ionized and a grey puff of smoke before the distinctive sound of the consoles single-use fuse popping.

I grunted my irritation as I fumbled with my harness, releasing it and pushing the broken console to the side. I scuttled over to the chair that held what little remained of my first officer. He had half of his torso missing, ripped into ribbons from something, and his blue-blood coated the area.

I gagged at the scene, looking away as I used one of my legs to push the corpse off of the damaged seat, sending a plume of copper tasting mist into the air as I made room for me to attempt to enable his console. Fumbling around for a few little moments, I managed to power the device on, its faint cool glow a welcome change from the emergency lighting.

Swiping through menus, I reached the transponders management system. I promptly activated the emergency beacon, only to collapse into a heap on the blood-covered floor soon after.

Location: Sol, Luna, Lunar mining test facility 004

Time: 36y, 05m, 02d

ID: Echo

Alright, so we have a new batch of test vehicles going out here. Our optimistic estimates show they will increase raw ore production by 8%, which doesn’t sound like much. Still, when combined with the new orbital insertion railgun, we should be looking at a substantial increase in useful fuel and ore outputs. 002 voiced their doubts about the production increase; however, they have allocated miners to proceed with testing.

In more exciting news, Kel’tsait’s unfortunate incident results have been processed by Dave and 422. It seems that our issue was one of proceeding to test why the ships we had deconstructed had safety interlocks that would have a preference towards destroying the ship rather than going through a planet.

We’ve decided to implement similar measures on all standard ships. However, 422 has declared their intention to further research these so-called “void demons.” Dave, on the other hand, in some strange twist, has started performing checks on the FTL drive to get it into mass production. Aiming to refit the Dreadnaught class to both updates to their armor and making it our first FTL warship.

If all goes well, we are hoping at full fleet operational status by early to mid-July. Ideally, after that, we can get our light coilgun platforms a jerry-rigged version of the FTL drive so they can rapidly reposition around the Sol system and any future fields of battle we send them.

The crawlers we sent all across the enemies civilian data network has picked up the chatter of unauthorized ships jumping system to system all over, some of which are identified as ships from the “Department of sentient rights,” while the rest are seemingly pirates, excluding one which is proceeding directly from the space of a yet unidentified government on a direct course to our region.

Hopefully, they aren’t coming for us in specific, but I haven’t yet been able to identify their affiliation or purpose.

In better news, my dear future reader, we have finally completed an FTL version of our gravitational wave station, and we are stuffing them out in the Oort Cloud. Each one is expensive as heck, being effectively a small station with their own communications beacon.

This is also in addition to our new prototype mining swarm carrier vehicle. Using swarm intelligence, these bad boys can mine magnitudes faster than anything in our industrial inventory. With FTL capability, the downtime for hauling back and forth is virtually eliminated. This may not sound like much yet, but it should, simulations to be believed, increase mining productivity by 4000%.

Think of all the ships we could make with that ore… We have the first prototype going through a half week shakedown on primary systems. It’s then going to join the existing fleet in the asteroid belt.

Anyhow, in two weeks we should have some results!

Location: Sol, Asteroid belt

Time: 36y, 05m, 19d

ID: Echo

Alright, took longer than expected, but both the mining carrier and the sensor system are out and operating~! The carrier looks like it will be just short of its production target, which is acceptable, while the FTL version of the GWS is on its way to the innermost portion of the Oort cloud.

Once the GWS is out that way, we are going to have one of the Dreadnaughts go do a multitude of approaches to test sensitivity. We will then have them go to full production. We are looking at a target of 2300 of them by the end of the year to create an entire detection grid; nothing will sneak up on us then.

In other news, Kel’tsait had to be restored from her backup, which is less than ideal. Doing this, though, did seem to cause a few...unexpected shifts. She just proposed that we retest all of our existing ground-based combat systems to ensure they are meeting our goals. A few of the others have weighed in with her, especially Dave, who has expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the old research AI regarding ground units.

We are creating a full series of environments on the moon and earth right now that we anticipate using them, from domed urban environments to forests. We also have plans to see which of us has the best natural code for strategic and tactical command since our previous tests have been… let’s say less than perfect. Kel’tsait was entirely too eager to volunteer for a tactical command position under Erika. And the fact that those two have gotten into some website called ‘Steam’ and have been using too many clock cycles there at simulated human time speeds… has me worried.

I think those two are planning something. I’ve kept my eyes out of their developmental requests as it would give my side an ‘unfair advantage’ apparently.

Whatever the case may be, you’re probably getting tired of me by now, too much rambling, I’m told.

Location: Sol, Earth, Mock battle site

Time: 36y, 06m, 02d

ID: Kel’tsait

Heyo everyone~! It’s good to be in the main log again~! So I’m here doing some final inspections for mine and Erika’s mock battle against Echo, and I gotta say, I’m super excited for seeing how this goes!

So, Erika finalized what I’m going to be doing, and I will be commanding 5 divisions. I’m not sure how that will go. But I trust Erika’s judgment in these matters. Anyway, the 5 are apparently split into 2 infantry divisions, 1 armored division, 1 airborne division, and 1 artillery division.

I was asked to give my opinion on this, and here it is. I asked for this, but I thought we were just gonna get better quality simulations, not that I’m complaining about having an excuse to play war like this, but still.

Erika hasn’t gotten around to telling me my part in the battleplan, too. However, just looking at what I’m allocated, I assumed I’m going to be some weird kinda reactionary force. That artillery division is almost entirely chassis-based platforms, the only exceptions being generator vehicles and mobile payload depots. I mean, these are cool and all, but a lot of this is based on mothballed human warfighting vehicles. They may have been good there, but who knows how they will perform.

Oh, and Echo approved my other request to change the viewpoint for the next entry! It’s gonna be this cool from my processing field kinda thing rather than these, honestly kinda bland logbook entries. This thing ultimately failed me when I was flying that test FTL ship; it felt super restrictive and stuff, you know?

But back to the whole battle thing, it looks like Echo is fortifying the fuck out of this place. I can see everything from antipersonnel wire to coilguns that can shoot into the low-orbitals from here. I really hope we aren’t gonna be trying to assault this place while dropping from orbit; that’s gonna be fucking hell in a fucking handbasket.

Anyways~! I’ve been rambling enough; Erika just pinged me that we’re going to have a meeting~!