Chapter nine(1)(S)

Anomaly AA-Z-643 is one of the strangest anomalies discovered to date. It is a black hole that is somehow twisted into a ♾ symbol. This anomaly seems impossible and we do not know its purpose.

It all just seemed too good to be true. Protection, and favours from an Ancient, off all things. Granted they couldn’t immediately get Ancient technology, but Selene still had her doubts.

What was in it for the Ancient? A few favours? Why would an Ancient need favours from primitives? A non-aggression policy? It could probably annihilate their entire galaxy if it wanted to.

She needed to consider it further while they were still cut off. Back home, all the politicians would think of would be how the alliance could catapult their race to greatness. Most of them would agree without even looking through the rest of the terms, and those that looked through it wouldn’t think about any potential implications.

On paper, it looked like the perfect alliance for them, but Selene knew there was a catch. She just needed to find it.

Chapter nine(2)(M)

There are many more instances of the ♾ symbol all over the galaxy. The Ancients seemed obsessed with this symbol. Take for example, the multiple stars with artificial orbits in this shape.

Ugh, I never liked negotiating. I was always a scholar at heart, and I always preferred more straightforward things, instead of the tangled labyrinth of diplomacy.

Still, now I could get back to work. I needed to start building. My plans were rolling along nicely, but to carry out my objective I needed protection. I couldn’t haul my unwieldy main body over to every problem, not when I would be working on a galactic scale. I needed a fleet, and it needed to be one that would frighten off enemies for trillions of years.

First, I would need to start up my spatial compressor. I needed a place to hide a giant shipyard and a huge fleet of ships, and what better place to hide them than inside of me?

As for materials, I had no need for them. After all, I came from a post-scarcity civilisation. All I needed was a lot of energy, and the crafters could spit out anything I could imagine.

I focused on big, capital ships. Smaller ships were useful because they were cheap and easy to build, two considerations I did not worry about. So I built big.

Giant battleships tens of kilometres long, huge dreadnoughts and carriers stretching for hundreds of kilometres, and the crowning jewel, a flagship. Flagships were big, even for us. Even our whole race only had a few hundred flagships in service at any one time, and they were nearly indestructible, with nothing short of 90% of its mass being vaporised disabling it, and even then they could very slowly regenerate.

A flagship was, in essence, a weapon of mass destruction. A starship the size of a large-ish planet, they stretched for tens of thousands of kilometres and could easily destroy entire galaxy clusters.

It was a huge investment, even for me, but I decided to build one. I had no real need for one, I could destroy every race in this galaxy with a single battleship, but it would intimidate them better than my current shell. Right now I just looked like a planet, but a starship the size of a planet should draw their attention given that their biggest ships were only a kilometre in size.

I got to building, making two fleets: the Light fleet and the Dark fleet. The Light fleet contained out of date, smaller ships with a carrier as the lead. It would be the one seen by the aliens, letting me hide my true strength. The Dark fleet would contain the most advanced ships I had with the flagship as the head. It would be used as a show of force if I needed it.

I sent orders to my drones and my production systems. Parts and components started being churned out, and inside an artificially enlarged space deep inside me, a fleet was taking shape. One that would shake the galaxy, and maybe the universe.