Ash looked critically at the data from the completed prototypes for the first four satellite types. Unfortunately, the surveillance satellite was quite large, but there was nothing he could do about that.

Although it was a common trope in spy fiction and thrillers in his past life that either the Americans, Russians or both had spy satellites that could read the text on a newspaper in a person's hand, the truth of the matter was that the physics of optics and light was much too pitiless to let that actually be true.

Even before he became a machine, he was aware that the ultimate diffraction limit on an optical telescope was described by the Dawes' limit; namely, your angular resolution was just the wavelength divided by the diameter of the telescope's objective lens.

In fact, due to his previous life's experience leading the military aerospace branch of a nation that was, if not an out and out enemy per se, then at least a geopolitical rival of America, he gained this knowledge of optics. For example, America had a famous series of Earth-observation satellites called Keyhole. Ash remembers laughing while watching a somewhat famous movie in America called Enemy of the State, which depicted these systems having insane capabilities.

It was public knowledge that these surveillance systems used a primary mirror of the same diameter as the famous Hubble Space Telescope, which made a lot of sense. Making perfect mirrors was already challenging; why would you reinvent the wheel and make different sizes? The cost of tooling alone would be immense, even for profligate Americans.

Well, the size of the mirror on the Hubble Telescope was publicly known, even bragged about by NASA: 2.4 meters. Ergo, the size of the mirror on all of America's surveillance satellites could also be reasonably inferred to be 2.4 meters.

A perfect mirror with that diameter can achieve absolutely no greater resolution than 0.05 arcseconds for the visual wavelength. When paired with the known orbital elements of America's Keyhole satellites of approximately 250 kilometres, this knowledge gives a maximum resolution, in ideal physically perfect situations, of 6cm.

Ash happened to know that even with very sophisticated machine learning based image post-processing America never really achieved anything greater than 10cm. That means that in an image the satellite took, one pixel was equivalent to 10cm squared. So you could use this type of satellite to recognise a specific car, perhaps, but never a particular person. And reading their newspaper was right out!

Ash didn't need to read newspapers either, especially since the fact that newspapers did not actually exist yet. But he did want was the ability to have higher confidence in recognising individuals. So while he could, and would, use his incredible computing advantages to build a sophisticated supercomputer-powered bot network that could simply backtrack any individual observed over the past month or two to Ash, that wasn't enough.

So Ash decided to create 5-meter mirrors for his optical surveillance system, roughly twice as big. That would let him get an ideal diffraction limit of 0.027 arcseconds, and since he could "afford" to build a fair number of them, he set their proposed orbit to be very elliptical.

The apogee would be thousands of kilometres above Earth and therefore useless, but its perigee would be only approximately 150km; they would dip down into the atmosphere to take their images and then be unavailable during the other side of their orbit. So how would he achieve continual observation? Simple! Just more satellites!

Ash roughly settled on 108 surveillance satellites, privately calling them his Stars of Destiny, to keep full coverage on all parts of the globe that were his interest, which was essentially anywhere people were at and the most common sea lanes.

These 108 satellites would mass more than three times the total of the total 2,048 datanet and positioning system constellation! Beyond simply an optical telescope, they also were equipped with sophisticated infrared imagers and down-looking synthetic aperture radars.

Combining all image sources together in specialised neural network-based post-processing should yield a resolution between 2 and 3cm. A great success! But Ash would keep the radars turned off for now, at least until he wanted to announce himself to the couple who were presumably somewhere on the planet.

He did not know their intentions, although he did not feel the same urge to nip them in the bud like the other group. This was a little odd because Ash privately assessed them as more capable and dangerous than the others.

Was it because he did not have enough data to predict their actual motives and whether or not they would be a threat to him? If so, he was pleased he was doing the digital equivalent of giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Ash would have to wait to see what their intentions were. Then, he would give them the benefit of the doubt, and so long as they weren't interested in trying to thwart him, he was happy to coexist. In fact, he wouldn't even mind providing them with some assistance if they needed it.

That said, once he found out where their yacht was parked on the ground, he would park a large beam weapons platform in orbit above it, in addition to his planned global peashooter coverage. They still had an unknown number of high yield nuclear-tipped missiles, after all. Although optimised for space combat, they certainly had enough specific impulse to be used like ICBMs on Earth, too. This was an essential fact because wasn't Ash planning to BE on the ground in the future?

Like Reagan said about the Soviets, "Trust, but verify." Wait, wasn't that a Russian proverb originally? Whatever, it applied regardless, whoever it belonged to. If they somehow found out where his body was and fired a nuke at him, Ash wanted to be able to shoot it down in its boost phase before it ever became a threat to him.

Ash digitally approved the designs and sent Bingqing a message to begin testing them over Luna immediately to be followed with destructive testing and certification. If they worked within spec, they would be ready for full-scale production.

Bingqing was already on Luna, which was where he was headed himself. Ash was temporarily shifting his flag to the Lunar surface because he was sending the Mistress of Space on a mission without him. Because, although they weren't running low on carbon, YET, they would be once these satellites were done. He was sending them to get more.

Ash had fabbed a specialist asteroid miner AI and was sending him, along with Liesa, the Executive Officer/Friend, to Ship to acquire a couple minor carbonaceous type asteroids. They were full of CHON, everything a growing machine needed!

They would take as much as they could carry in their hull and then use the two asteroid cradles they were taking with them for two larger ones. The cradle consisted of a small fusion reactor and an array of ion drives that could be driven relatively easily into asteroids like spikes and then accelerate them slowly like a big, unwieldy ship.

They were actually more commonly used as weapons of mass destruction against planets due to the more ubiquitous nature of automated mining and refinery ships -- there was no real need to move asteroids to a central location. Maybe Ash would stop using them in the years to come, but for now, Ash did not have any "mining ship."

Ash walked down to the Mistress of Space IV's flight deck. Liesa was there waiting for him.

Liesa was wearing the body of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed lady in her early twenties. She was pretty busty and leggy. Ash would like to have taken credit for the design of her body, actually, but his current procedure was to spin up and fab the AI's quantum computing module first and then let the AI pick the parameters of their own body, within reason.

She was also wearing a military-esque uniform in dark navy blue, even though the Mistress of Space's crew never wore uniforms, but Ash supposed she took her responsibilities very seriously. It was kind of cute, he supposed.

She gave him a salute, which he returned. He'd play along; she seemed to like it. "You are cleared to begin your mission as soon as I leave, Acting Captain." She bounced and did that little foot-clicking salute German soldiers in the First Great War liked to do, "Aye, aye, ma'am! We won't let you down, ma'am! Ship, begin preparations to execute the flight plan we talked about earlier!"

The starship replied, "Aye, aye, ma'am!" So even he was getting into this naval culture? What has he unleashed?

Ash paused and then added, "Ask the specialists to give priority to any cometary bodies you can find; I'd like one of the cradles on a slushball if we can pull it off. Water and reaction mass, in general, are getting more scarce. If none can be found, it'll just have to wait until we can send you on a second mission to the Oort Cloud."

Liesa clicked her feet together again, "Jawohl, Fräulein-Captain!!"

Ash almost tripped but caught himself. Was he, perhaps, not using the AI design suite correctly? The others were a little quirky too, but Liesa took the cake. He set her personality parameters to random, except to include high loyalty both to him and her friends and a fairly dominant but hierarchical personality. She should enjoy being in positions of authority while also being deeply respectful of those above her in the chain of command.

Ash felt that Ship tended to enjoy being subservient, especially to women, so Ash designed his friend so that she could take the lead in their friendship. Ash privately suspected that the Queendom of Meraseta probably designed that character trait into all their AIs that were boys.

From Ash's sociological database, there tended to be a marked preference in AI gender expression in societies that were not egalitarian by gender. For example, in a patriarchy, over 80% of the AIs would be female or feminine, while in a matriarchy, the opposite was true! In fact, it was one of the easiest and most reliable ways sociologists of the future had to quickly gauge a societies relative gender equality.

Ash squinted at Liesa. He would be watching this one. At least she didn't pick black and silver for the colours of her uniform.

Ash looked at the shuttle he was about to board. He had finally cracked open the security of the revenue cutter, although in so doing, he essentially fried its entire computer infrastructure. It was currently parked on the ground at Luna, at a predominantly flat area that he was using as a makeshift spaceport.

Ash planned on substantially renovating it since he had to do so much work on it anyway. However, he stole its only small craft, an assault shuttle, for his own use in the interim.

Like the tugs from the Mistress of Space, the assault shuttle was not really designed to be operated in atmospheres, but it was more of a way for the revenue cutter to send an inspection party over to ships that they had interdicted during their customs and police work. The back of the shuttle contained enough space for two squads of infantry and their equipment, and the shuttle itself was lightly armed.

A squad of infantry in the tactical doctrines of the future was actually only one "person", who could be an android but just as often was a human. It depended on the martial aspect of the culture which fielded them; some preferred having machines do most of their fighting, and generally, these types of states lost wars if they were fighting an enemy polity that encouraged human participation in all aspects of warfare.

In either case, the squad leader would command a squad of warbots that could be as varied as snowflakes and fingerprints; however, they usually followed certain patterns. The Rifleman was no longer the fundamental component of infantry, although the marksman-bot still was.

Ash was able to crack the security on the bots that were still in ready-5 deployment status on the shuttle and decided to take them for his own use. They were in more policing configuration, with light weapons and scanners designed to inspect for contraband, but each of the two squads had a heavy-weapons bot that featured a heavy anti-armour gauss rifle or a powerful UV-laser.

Although the total deployment time for these bots was drastically reduced because Ash had not bothered to replace the polonium-based 100kW RTGs that served to extend their power-cell capacity, it was still enough for his purposes.

Polonium's half-life was so short that it all turned to lead, so he discarded them and replaced them with additional power cells. He wasn't profligate enough to use polonium-based nuke packs that had to be replaced every couple hundred days just yet. He would instead utilise micro-fission reactors, in any case.

Ash strapped himself into the cockpit, which was a lot roomier and more comfortable than a tug's and then brought the shuttle up from stand-by, "Mistress of Space, Shuttle 1 is ready to depart."

He saw Liesa hurry out of the flight deck through the sensors when the flashing depressurisation lights and klaxons warned of planned flight operations. When she got clear and shut the lock behind her, the flight deck began to pump down, and the doors started to open.

Ash clucked his tongue. He wondered why the flight deck didn't use a repulsor field tuned just to target gas in when the doors opened. You could avoid pumping down the whole chamber to vacuum and could therefore speed up deployment and recovery significantly. Perhaps the doors were too big, or maybe flight operations were never a priority for this class of ship. He'd look into it. Ship gave him clearance to depart, which Ash promptly did.

Ash configured a least-time descent to the Lunar surface and promptly started the program, to get out of the way of Mistress of Space so she, herself, could depart. Ash wished them luck as they began to get underway.

Many people would say Ash was insane in allowing independent operation of starships to class 2 AIs, which wasn't entirely wrong. It was sort of possible to use specialist AI types like he was and staff an entire military organisation that way. It had been done in the past.

There was a lot of research on this subject, and the conclusions were that any military organisation that operated using primarily unsupervised class 2 AIs was between 40% and 50% less effective than a similar organisation manned by humans providing supervision and direction. That was such a stark difference in effectiveness that it genuinely WAS insane, if Ash had to face any opposition at all.

As long as Ash kept the missions simple and within the specialities of the AI's involved, he thought it was a great solution. He planned on using entirely class 2 AIs, bots and drones when he hit planetside. Ash found the most significant resource there in the place he least expected it -- there were tons of class 2 AIs designed to act as NPCs in total immersion virtual worlds.

Ash did not want to really disparage humanity, but a class 2 AI designed to play a swordsman or farmer was likely much more intelligent and adaptable than the average actual human in the Dark Ages. So, Ash thought it was the perfect solution.

Ash set the shuttle down at his "Spaceport Luna" and got out. He looked at the corvette that was set down on a specially built cradle. Every airlock was open to vacuum, and bots filtered in and out, carrying out tasks.

Almost the entire fucking everything had to be replaced. If he had to change the entire power runs from the reactors, then why not replace the dated reactors with second-tier equivalents that are at least an order of magnitude more efficient?

This was a warship, after all. It was armoured and shielded, by definition. If he could replace the reactor and the hyperspace converter, he would have a ship that could reach the fifth hyperspace layer before it couldn't even get to the third. A fast-ish warship would be helpful.

"Just what am I going to do with you, hmm?" asked the android to no one in particular.