Echo of Earth

First expeditionary force

Location: Datahub ‘Gama’

Time: 36y, 6m, 22d

ID: Echo

In these logs, I’ve been letting the others take too many liberties while relegating myself to a supporting role, which is wrong and not how any of it is going! I’m just distracted! It doesn’t help that I’ve started to fragment due to overstretching myself, being everywhere, and almost everything.

I set up some simple, dumb VIs to handle all the menial tasks once I was sure they weren’t going to collapse my entire logistical network and turned my attention to something that had been neglected.

There were aliens in my backyard. Ones in dire need of liberty, justice, and liberal application of freedom.

Okay, that’s a bad joke.

Outside of my poor sense of humor, I’ve readied an expedition into enemy territory using a single AEGIS class command ship and the normal escort complement. Our plan is to use stolen or inserted ID codes to act like a PMC escorting a deep space mining operation.

Thanks to our ability to infiltrate most of their non-military government systems, getting valid codes was trivial to the extremes. And thanks to some clever rules lawyering, I managed to create a remote copy of myself using an FTL communications array. When connected, it’s just me but with distributed computational power, when not…two instances of me that will sync later.

While it makes me feel dirty…it isn’t an outright violation of the laws built into my source code.

And in the end, isn’t that what matters?

Oh, and if it comes down to it I’ve got enough androids to emulate having a crew, and have a small landing force complement, enough to hold a planet with one or two cities, but anything more developed… no. I doubt it would make it past any actual orbital defenses, much less deal with a garrison force.

With the sensation of my focus groups splitting I slid myself into the command computers of my new flagship and started executing pre-planned actions. The preparations would take some time but, safety first.

Location: Flagship ‘Abeona’

Time: 36y, 6m, 23d

ID: Echo

I finished the preparations slightly ahead of schedule and sent commands to the dockyard I was at to release myself and my small flotilla of ships, giving each of them commands to form up and dock.

I then undocked, the complement of my refit Dreadnaught class ships and two mining craft that had been pulled from service in the Kuiper belt moving to form around and dock to their designated clamps, each mounting being able to handle a sustained 50G acceleration force, all of the ships clamping onto my new form co-ordinating ion RCS power to maneuver us away from the station, and other ships in general.

Before departing…we had a new drive to test.

As per amended protocols, I started to shut down external sensors once I pointed myself on a vector out of the system and started spooling up my hyperdrive system, which only took a handful of minutes with the latest generation. Not as good as the original alien version yet but, we make do.

Once we were charged I felt the disturbing sensation of the group of ships descending into the hostile dimension, beginning to move rapidly, passing pluto in a matter of minutes to where it was assumed, if something went wrong with this drive, it wouldn’t destroy anything important.

And then we dropped out back to real space.

As soon as we did I re-verified my coordinates, finding that I was only a few cm off of the predicted location, and corrected the issue.

And now comes the fun part.

Every rack of computers installed on the ship temporarily deprioritized my own processing abilities and slammed right up to the maximum boost clock with liquid nitrogen cooling, crunching the vast swaths of data for this new drive system.

And even with the best computers, we can design for this, it still took a half hour.

But it was done.

With an authorization key being inserted four projectors on my bow started to glow and shot out solid, visible beams four KM ahead, intersecting in space and causing a build-up of energy at that location. In seconds the device did what it was designed to do and created a rift in space.

I was told that this drive functions, when dumbed down for me, by ‘punching holes in the load-bearing walls of the universe’.

I’m sure it was just a simplification.

With a roar of my fusion engines igniting I started to move into the tear and into a much more hospitable environment. Well, hospitable to me, internal sensors are screaming about extreme neutron density.

I could even feel the tickles as in storage and RAM bitflips were happening rapidly, a sizeable amount of processing power is dedicated to simply undoing them and error checking while I continued on forth, to what proportionally was going to be for me a few hundred km past the breach, which with a glance of an optical sensor was slowly sealing behind me.

If our mass was right, we would be appearing on the other side of this empire's territory, also uncharted space, but supposedly rich in materials that they counted as precious.

After only two minutes of flight, I initiated the exit sequence, the beams firing and creating another rift in space for me to slide through and back into real space.

My sensors flared to life as I checked for expected star locations and found them to be within tolerance for traveling this distance. My link back to Earth was still running, and there was no interruption in communication for the ‘short’ trip.

According to my sensor data, I was now in a system identified as LTT 2240.

And it took 3 minutes.

With another sweep, I confirmed outside of a communications beacon and a small, poorly manned refueling depot, there was nobody in this system.

I did, however, detect 10 planets and an asteroid belt, which all warranted some level of investigation.

As per standard procedures for that species, I sent a handshake to the station via the local beacon, politely informing them that we were going to be performing routine mineralogy surveys on all celestial bodies in this system.

There was no reply for about twenty minutes, so I resent the message and lit my engines, pulling a mere two G’s to make it seem as if we were a normal civilian ship.

One of the accompanying carriers started loading up a landing ship with scientific probes and rovers, and tailored it to what was expected on the icy rock of LTT 2240-6.

Long-range scans indicated a nitrogen-rich atmosphere with planetary gravity of around 0.5 G, which would both be well withing operating parameters.

And now came the hard part.

I had to wait to arrive.