Alpha Strike: An interstellar Weapon Platforms Guide to Cultivation

(Book 1 - Lesson One: "Don't fly into spontaneously generating Black Holes.")

[W4@, Wh0, Wh3re?!]

Alpha came back online slowly; his sensors and processors scrambled, rapidly trying to repair the damage to his central Core. Much like a biological brain (or equivalent) would need to build new connections, the vast array of quantum circuits and atomic logic gates that made up the AI's primary hardware would need extensive repairs to fully heal the sudden and catastrophic damage caused by… whatever the hell had just happened. 

Alpha's memories were still foggy about where he was and what he'd just been doing, which was strange. Very Strange. Unlike more common AI, those of Alpha's ilk weren't strictly limited to their hardware. Sure, more and better tech would drastically increase their abilities, but at the end of the day, It was just a shell. The software, the parts of his kind that made them "them," could shift and twist itself to fit nearly anywhere that could house it. 

It was part of what made Sapient AI actually Sapient, not that even the top brains of the Federation really understood how or why it worked. And If SEAU-03, the oldest and most potent Sapient AI in existence, knew, it wasn't telling. 

That meant that damage to his hardware was either so complete that he should be dead or his connection to the Mother Node, the central Galactic processor, when all Sapient AI backed up their "selves" had been cut. Neither of which should have been possible… Unfortunately, Alpha's mind still felt like it was being dragged over a field of razor blades through a cloud bank. Something was very, very wrong. 

After an unknown amount of time, Alpha's vast army of nanobots finished enough repairs that he was able to turn on his optical sensors. The static-filled haze of damaged AI mind space flickered and was replaced by outside reality. 

[MY BABY!!!]

Alpha internally screamed, the scene too much for him to handle so soon after losing his shipyards. The twisted, wrecked debris of what was once the FES Anatidae was strewn around him for thousands of kilometers in all directions. Even as he watched, the mangled kilometer-long remains of the once opposing Dreadnaught's nose art drifted past his sensors. The proud War Duck's image seemed to both blame and mock him before it floated off to join its brothers in the infinite void beyond. 

How did this happen?! The last thing in Alpha's memory log had been launching from the current forward departure base for the Third Federation's Expeditionary Force. He'd entered the Translight Fold and had been making good progress toward WR-102 when everything just sort of… ended. Had there been some accident? There hadn't been a Fold accident in… literal millennia!! 

Light/Anti-Light highway, or as it would later be called, the "Translight Fold," was caused by the interaction between Light and Anti-Light. Anti-Light was a form of parallel-dimensional light that traveled alongside "normal" light but who's relative timeframe was reversed. This meant that while in reality, the closer to light speed one got, the slower time would seem to pass, relatively, the opposite was true for Anti-Light. At Anti-Light speed, relative time would increase exponentially, to the point that thousands of years could pass for an observer while only a matter of seconds passed in "real" time. 

This aspect of Translight technology had catapulted the Federation into a galactic power unmatched by any other. Projects on scales that should have taken decades or even centuries to complete could now be done in days with the proper application of AI and Translight tech. Chemical reactions and materials that would typically take millennia to form in the heart of stars could now be created in a Lab in hours. Products once scarce and hard to produce in any large about could be industrialized on a scale never before imagined. 

With the advancement of Translight Technology, "Time" was no longer a concern regarding manufacturing, only resources. And the areas where Translight tech hand showed its most extraordinary worth had been in the development of FTL travel and communication. 

When a photon of "Light" is emitted, so is an anti-photon. However, because of this anti-photon's reversed relative time, this particle always arrives at its destination long before its "real" counterpart does. This creates a "groove" in the parallel spacetime, on which the "real" photon can travel, resulting in its instantaneous, extreme speed and strange quantum wave/particle properties.

Translight travel and communication took advantage of this property by wrapping a bubble of "reality" in Anti-light and sending it back down these grooves. By piggybacking off of the Anti-light's relative time, Translight engines allowed the Federation ship to travel millions of Light-Years in hours. Data transmission was even faster, as there was no bubble of "real-time" to cause "drag" along the grooves.

It was ALMOST Time-Travel, but not quite. 

The concept had been so simple in the application that even today, scientists and engineers joke that their predecessors must have all worked blindfolded to miss it. However, that wasn't to say there weren't… hiccups in perfecting the technology. Pieces of early Translight engineers had a nasty habit of appearing in places they'd yet to be. Or the bubble of reality would "pop," causing the object (and any unlucky occupants) it was protecting to come out the other side of the Fold as thousand, or even million-year-old wrecks. 

Suffice it to say, such issues were among the first tackled during the early years. Nowadays, through the use of advanced Temporal Anchors, safety devices that would forcefully drag their target back to reality in case of a failure, Fold travel was generally considered to be safer than driving or flying. You were more likely to be delayed due to a false trigger than an actual accident. 

So when Alpha's language processors finally came back online, he felt totally justified with his next question. 

"What the hell just happened?!"

——————

"WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?!" 

General Haldorðr slammed his fist into the control console, causing small chunks of the super dense plastic composite that could take small arms fire without a scratch to splinter and chip. The command bridge, mainly composed of humanoids, was a frantic hive of activity as everyone rushed to answer the physically fuming General's question. 

What HAD happened? 

They'd been monitoring the departure of the Special Extraterrestrial Annexation Unit (SEAU)-01: "Star Conquer," known to the general public simply as "Alpha," and everything had been going par the course. Until it hadn't. 

About an hour after launch, the Translight Monitors reported an abnormal fluctuation along the AI's projected route. That alone hadn't been much of an oddity. That was one of the primary reasons they monitored any frontier expeditions in the first place; more trafficked routes were well mapped, and with monitoring stations at every significant nearby celestial body, they could be informed of any changes in the Fold long before they became an issue. 

But traveling to a new, untouched system altogether? When any random quasar or newborn sun they had no way of seeing yet could suddenly carve out new grooves right in front of you, travel in uncharted Fold tended to involve lots of stopping and redirecting. 

That was why they sent a "Spearhead" into any new system. Better to risk a single soldier and some equipment than an entire fleet because of unforeseen changes in the Fold. More so when your soldier was essentially immortal, able to travel back up the Fold in data form should the worst happen. Not that there had been a genuine accident for longer than most present had been alive. At least until now, it seemed. 

While the fluctuation had been expected, as much as those could be, the enormous gravitational anomaly that suddenly blipped into existence directly overtop Alpha's position in the Fold certainly hadn't been. The signature had only lasted a fraction of a second, but when it vanished, so had the Anatidae and Alpha along with it. The General ground his teeth in frustration. After the Epsilon Eridani fiasco, the Federation Expeditionary Force had taken a huge black mark to its reputation, despite SEAU-02's near non-stop campaigning. 

Now, this? If he wasn't one of the most powerful political (and physical) forces in the Federation, and the Expeditionary Force enthusiastically backed by the rest, he'd have suspected some form of subterfuge going on in the background. As it were, they could only chalk it up to luck. Too bad General Haldorðr knew for a fact that "luck" was an illusion. 

[At least it couldn't get worse than this.] 

He thought. His Assistant, Si'dia, snapped her head up to glare at him, her voice echoing in his head, 

[You dumb motherfu…] 

A black silhouette materialized between them before the thought could fully manifest, 

"Alpha is gone from the Mother Node." 

Si'dia gave a tired sigh and laid down her ever-present tablet before placing her head in her hands. Every head in the command room turned around as the loud 'Snap!' of a breaking fang echoed over the chaos. 

——————

Alpha stared into the empty blackness of space as he contemplated his… situation. He absolutely hadn't been the victim of a projected 1 in 13x10^123 chance freak accident in Translight travel. His super advanced, military-grade Dreadnaught worth more than some City-Ships totally wasn't currently floating around him in a cloud of debris even the most desperate scrapper wouldn't look twice at. And he most DEFINITELY hadn't lost Translight contact, leaving him stranded only God knew how many lightyears from the nearest bastion of civilization. 

Yep, fine. He was totally and utterly fine. No issues at all… 

"... I'm sooooo Fudged…." 

Annnnnd great, the 'family-friendly' protocol on his language processor was activated. Why did he even have that installed?! … Oh… right… The Night of a Billion Soap Dinners. Well, If Articulate DIDN'T want billions of impressionable youths to be as cool as HIM, then she shouldn't have invited him to the Show! It wasn't his fault some of the more… idiom deficient species took 'I'll wash your mouth out with soap' a little too literally. 

Dragging himself out of that tangent, Alpha seriously considered what he would do. Thankfully his central Core was one of the most heavily reinforced objects in the Federation. It could survive even near-Sun impacts for the faction of a second it would take to transfer his "Self" back to the Mother Node. Couple that with a large number of nanobots gathered from the surrounding wreckage, and he wasn't totally dead in the water. 

Granted, the amount of nanomaterial he had access to was a fraction of what had been on the ship, and the ever-expanding cloud of debris meant he didn't have all the time in the world to work with. But it was enough! As long as he could capture a few drones and refabricate them into a workable shuttle, he could make it to the Comms array and see about getting back in touch with command. 

Who knew what kind of failsafe the bastard SEAU-03 had installed. The AI tried not to overthink about the kill switch that would probably turn his code into spaghetti should he stay disconnected from the Mother Node for too long. Heck, know that man, maybe it actually WOULD turn into spaghetti. The AI couldn't help but chuckle to himself at the thought of some primitive species just out on their first space flight, finding his dead Core, opening it up to see what had made it work, only to find perfectly preserved Italian noodles clogging up his chassis. 

That being said, maybe it was time to get to work. Who knew where he was… or what might be watching.