The Heavy Patrol Ships had been presented to the Union as the TGC’s biggest weapons. They were not in fact the biggest ships, that went to the honor of the prototype Light Patrol Ship, nor were they actually weapons. They were mining drone fleet carriers with some defenses slapped on. The actual big sticks of the TGC were the Negotiator class ships, the things that deleted planets. Said ships had a few commonalities: extensive warp cores, point defense, shielding, EW systems, and stealth systems, as well as a minuscule (relative to regular ones) spinal-mounted gateway and high-power skipgate. Said gateways would connect to one of the Mighty Pen sites, specifically the Quill part of such. And what, you may be asking were the Mighty Pen sites? Well, antimatter was used as fuel in the TGC for everything bigger than a shuttlecraft, as well as for weaponry, and in the case of that university for giving people heart attack species equivalents via “firecrackers.” The extent of antimatter production had been undersold to the Union, the Dyson swarms and ring groups in fact only provided about 32% of it. The rest came from Mighty Pen sites one to four, massive installations that used the Penrose process for power. Said sites also manufactured VYAS aka variable yield antimatter shells. The Quills fired said shells at both a very high rate of fire and velocity directly into a gateway. Ultimately this meant that the Negotiator class artillery vessels could aim a gun vastly larger than the ship itself. Naturally, there was an ongoing project for optimizing those weapons in case it was ever needed, a project Sam was part of. Sam didn’t actually know what Project Reality Diner was, something he really ought to see about fixing, but regardless of that Sam Schierling was at MP-2-Q-27-5-67 fiddling with some firing simulations. He probably wouldn’t be using the Quills in the immediate future. Samantha Schierling was a multitude of light-years away designing an automated vessel for collecting resources and manufacturing root beer hard candies, leaving some parts as the autogenerated version and tweaking the position of individual wires in other parts, just `cause why not really. Samuel Schierling was making snowmen in a blizzard. Samantha was talking to their friends, Feyvun Kidu, Ava Jennings, Rasauq Tsifnori, and Alex Malphas. Samuel was making by hand a meal of artificial salmon and scalloped potatoes. Sam was in the Xon’Ankail system pondering the taste of that star. Sam was thinking about what their next body should be, another dragon maybe. Sam was lazing about. Sam was working on blending together a few different martial arts. Sam, also known as Samuel, Samantha, Legion, and the biggest multicorporeal, was in fact doing all of this and far more at once. Sam and their friends had a considerable amount of political power. Rasauq, for instance, owned Quasar Industries and was in many respects a Pillar of the TGC running smoothly, while Alex had a pretty well-deserved reputation of encyclopedic knowledge, one might even say they were a Library. Feyvun meanwhile was an absolutely brilliant programmer who had released many updates over the years to the open-source general-purpose fabricator software, firmly believing in letting every person be an Island of infrastructure if they so wished. Ava was said to know every dirty secret, to be able to Doctor any perception. Pillar, Legion, Island, Library, and Doctor made the Quinumvirate and while they had no official government position nor did they have a finger in every pie, when they spoke people listened. Sam was gloating that he had noticed something before Ava had and would handle looking through the place for any further clues since they were closest. Ava looked over the responses of fear and anxiety from people in the Union over the video uploaded by Sveta, apparently for some reason unnerved by a neck growing teeth and other events in such. The algorithms that decided comment order in the various video hosting sites and forums were ever so subtly altered to promote people talking about the attackers deserving what happened and a few hundred billion bot accounts were readied. Sam turned a not-insignificant portion of his attention to the Xon’Ankail system. Suux`ataimot was ultimately the highest military authority within the system, even if the vast majority of the time that boiled down to just looking at traffic. He was still staring in shock at the organic thing of impossible proportions when another nine appeared. Four of the creatures broke off for other parts of the system but the remaining six all headed for Xon`Ankail-5-2, or Xon52 for short, the second moon of a gas giant, the primary inhabited body in the system. They vanished, into warp according to the instruments. Then he hit the panic button. Suux ran to rally the troops, measly as the very concept was, all the way cursing the fact that they were somehow in charge of the military, militia really, for the backwater system in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, the processing power of the outdated computers was shifted away from traffic control and towards military concerns. Once traffic control was near the very bottom of priorities, only then did flight plan requests start filing in quantities hitherto unforeseen. Though it may have seemed like an attempted DDOS attack, the traffic control system looked into things and as best it could determine only one flight plan was filed per Spaceflight Capable Organism. The traffic control system took a moment to load that definition and its attached legalities into active memory, since the term had previously, for this particular system at least, only applied to the vristruks, or as they were more commonly known among the humans, space whales. One could easily mistake the vristrusks’ physiology for a thought experiment in how bizarre a system could evolve. Organic spaceships were a rather stark departure from say, an octopus. Vristrusks were fairly intelligent, but they were also pretty damn slow, in thought, in travel, in reproduction, in everything really. They didn’t count as manufactured spaceships by the Union’s legal code, so they needed their own traffic control standards. Since they were so rare and not all that big anyway, those standards were pretty relaxed. Somewhere along the line, those standards were made applicable to all Spaceflight Capable Organisms, not just the vristrusks. If those more relaxed standards happened to apply to Sam, well that wasn’t his fault. Sam was moving at a fairly low warp level due to being within a star system so it was around twelve minutes after he arrived in the system that the traffic control system, still without a supervising intelligence since Suux had rushed off, was queried on the state of those flight plans, the SCOs in question much closer to the planets they were looking to land on. The traffic control system tried to delay by declaring Sam an invading army, but it quickly lost that case since how ever could a single person qualify as an army? If the traffic control system was a person it would probably have been shouting something along the lines of “what the hell do you want from me?!” but as it was it simply did as programmed to and organized the landing of all the landing crafts. It was at this moment that the whole “quantities hitherto unforeseen” part became apparent to those besides the traffic control system as internal hangers in Sam opened their sphincter doors and Sam flew out of Sam, carrying Sam. Fun fact, a roughly spherical body (not counting the tentacles) with a radius of 350 km has a volume of around about 1.8*10^8 km^3. Even with only a small portion of that being hangars, Sam could fit quite a lot of bodies in one of his bodies, and in this case, he had six unloading landing craft onto the planet. The planet was smothered in what was legally not an invading army since it was in fact just one single tourist. For some reason, not everybody saw it that way, but mysteriously various bits of software kept failing and pleas for help went unsent. The computer virus in question would later be traced back to one of the various companies with economic incentive to make everyone hate the humans, one of the various companies that definitely had not been behind that flyer. Suux had somewhat successfully rallied the military but it didn’t do much. Planetary defense platforms with lasers or ion beams and such things were left alone as Sam’s bodies absorbed, spread out thermally-conductive-subdermal-networks, and utilized the energy. Warp missiles were yanked back into warp 1 with gravity spikes and destroyed by point defense while kinetic weaponry was deflected by the very same organic gravity manipulators. Some got through and hit Sam, but the springy construction of his tentacles meant the impact was diffused, and any actual damage was quickly regenerated. Of course, such firepower was wildly disproportionate to use against one person who was, as established, not an invading army. As such, Sam was well within his rights within the Union to act in self-defense, and did so with reasonable force, as while he ate the autonomous weapon platforms, he only disabled the weaponry on crewed platforms. Planetside, and in those four other stations, it was much the same. Any who attacked him were placed under a citizen’s arrest, their weaponry incorporated. Odd that, how many muggers there were shooting at Sam. Ships fled the system and Sam let them be. If those ships happened to run into Sam and end up with stowaways on their hull, then really it was their fault for not checking with the traffic control system. Sam had, after all, filed everything correctly. The bodies planetside were all one or another of the Heavy Aid and Rescue Medic Series, clearly not anything having to do with military matters. Suux’ataimot meanwhile, was not having a very fun day. “Shoot, damn you!” Suux yelled, fumbling a new magazine into his gun. Explosions rang his head but the tide kept coming. Those six massive creatures had vomited up innumerable smaller ones that were acting with perfect coordination, launching each other over barriers, seeing from every angle. He didn’t know how many still lived, any caught by the beasts weren’t seen again. They had lost contact with the other groups and it wouldn’t be much longer before they were overrun. Friendly fire had brought down several people but most were lost to the tendrils covered in eyes and mouths. People would be plucked into sewers, into buildings, into the swarm. Others had fallen to projectiles or to some sort of aerosolized anesthetic. The enemy was toying with them, letting them pretend there was any hope. Sam meanwhile was stabilizing those shot by their allies. Bloody morons with no trigger discipline they were. In the end, Sam searched that solar system as well as the destination of every ship, and the destination of every ship in those systems. Suux’ataimot at least got a nice meal carefully prepared to be compatible with his species.