Why Won't They Combine? (1)
After hauling that gloriously named Super Dreadnought into the Empire, the first headache had been the power source—or rather, the sheer lack of energy. Towing the colossal vessel had put the Empire's tug fleets through hell, but they had gritted their teeth and dragged it all the way to Quesada. The result: the Leviathan-class Super Dreadnought—or simply the Leviathan—now sat moored near the orbital defense command of the Quesada system…
"So that is the new flagship the Holy Sevelian Empire has just deployed."
"They say it is a ship from the Dark Age. Its majesty is truly overwhelming."
It was already serving as a living advertisement of imperial might for the diplomats who regularly visited the Imperial Palace or my Foreign Executive Ministry, as well as for foreign tourists who came simply to gawk.
Of course, I had not risked a collision with the Precursor Empire just to keep a giant mascot parked in orbit.
This ancient vessel, wrested from the Precursor Empire's interference, is larger and more powerful than any battleship currently in existence.
Yet its power core has been worn and damaged by the passage of ages, and at present it can deliver only about 3% of its original performance.
In practical terms it is no stronger than a single modern battleship, so most engineers argue it would be better to dismantle the ship and harvest its Dark Age components and technology.
A few engineers, however, insist that—though it will demand enormous resources and time—the vessel can be fully restored and serve alongside the Imperial fleet.
Option 1: Repair the ship. Give this vessel the chance to serve our Empire. (Ship unusable until repairs complete; Empire's monthly research point gain −50% during repairs)
Option 2: No need to repair it, but no need to scrap it either. (Status quo maintained; event ends)
Option 3: If it has no value as a combat asset, it has no value at all. (Ship destroyed; large quantity of parts, alloys, and random Dark Age technology obtained; Biological Core affinity −1000; additional event proceeds)
Damn, look at all those options.
Three choices attached to a single event was as good as a certificate that I had made the right call.
It's basically a giving tree. Whichever way I go, the loot is generous.
Of course I wasn't crazy enough to scrap it. Even though we had cooperated for a while, the Prosnak had been fundamentally hostile. Then there were the rebellions that kept flaring up in the East whenever chaos gave them an opening, the separatists who led them, and the Precursor Empire that might one day come hunting us in person. With enemies potentially on every side, I had zero intention of treating a Super Dreadnought like a garden ornament.
Option 1: Repair the ship. Give this vessel the chance to serve our Empire.
(Ship unusable until repairs complete; Empire's monthly research point gain −50% during repairs)
Following that logic, I naturally picked Option 1 and ordered a full restoration.
And now, a full month after that order…
"Whoa, still under repair, yeah?"
"Yeah."
My small, precious Super Dreadnought was still circling the satellite orbit of Kazan, undergoing open-space repairs.
Why not use a perfectly good shipyard and instead leave it floating dangerously in orbit? The answer was painfully simple: it was simply too huge.
Even the latest battleships and carriers that served as fleet flagships looked like toys next to my little Leviathan. Trying to break it into blocks for dry-dock work had failed because the armor plating was completely immune to modern cutting equipment. Which left us with the scene Riel and I were watching on the office screen right now.
No repair berth? Use space itself as the berth. No proper tools? Mobilize the specialized construction ships normally reserved for building giant orbital structures and colonies. Need a small army of specialists?
"Minister Arto! Thank you so much for lending me Miss Alina last time!"
"Glad to hear it. In that case, I have a small favor to ask of Minister Vermouth."
"What is it?"
Just dump in the poor technical slaves—sorry, graduate students—who were piled up in the Ministry of Technology and Science. As for ordinary labor, surplus manpower was the default setting of any interstellar empire. If we still needed more hands, slap simple AI into a few robots and call it a day.
A theocratic spiritualist empire using robots? People might raise an eyebrow, but our Empire never actually banned them. Legally there was no problem. What people hated were fully mechanized bodies with true intelligence—like the Synths. Cyborgs who only replaced a limb or two after an accident usually got a free pass. Of course, if someone voluntarily swapped a healthy arm for a mechanical one and got caught, the religious police would cheerfully rip it off and bolt on a flesh-and-blood replacement.
For all those reasons, my small, precious Super Dreadnought was now deep into orbital repairs. And right beside it…
—Vwoooom!
…was Ash, who had realized she was essentially a contemporary of the ship and was clumsily trying to mimic the silhouette of the Super Dreadnought Leviathan. The hull was so vast and the details so intricate that up close the shape still looked twisted in places, but a month of diligent practice had produced something that, from a distance, was starting to look almost convincing.
And the most important piece of all—the biological core that had lived as one body with the Leviathan for hundreds of thousands of years, also known as the "Administrator"—
"Seeing the ship from the outside like this is a truly novel sensation."
—was currently living a leisurely life in a private room provided by the Foreign Executive Ministry while the vessel underwent repairs.
Of course she was not simply living the life of an unemployed freeloader.
"So you were wandering that star system from the very beginning?"
"No. Originally I was in cryo-sleep with the ship set to automatic navigation. When I next awoke, both I and the vessel were buried beneath the surface of a planet whose name I did not even know."
"Then how did you dig yourselves out? I heard you had no energy left."
"To be precise, the only reason I realized I was buried was because some faction successfully excavated me from underground."
To me it was lore that wasn't quite lore. To the people of this era—starting with the Minister of Defense—she was a living archive of classified ancient history, and she was serving as our consultant.
"Who excavated you?"
"Hmm… from the radio traffic I collected while navigating, the ones who dug me up were followers of someone called the Warlord."
That was how we also learned that the original owners of this ancient warship had been none other than the Warlord's forces.
"And if you visited the Warlord's flagship, you must have seen that strangely shaped throne he sat on?"
"Ah, yeah, there was something like that."
I recalled the thing one of my Purge Squad members had torn out after they turned the compartment into a star-shaped crater, calling it "weird-looking," and then parked in the Executive Ministry break room.
"That is actually an ancient neural-interface control device capable of piloting both me and my ship via brainwaves."
"…?"
Hearing "Actually, that was my remote control" was just one of the many fascinating revelations she kept casually dropping.
"Can you walk us through the process that led to your current freedom?"
"Of course."
Through that account we learned the shocking fact that my small, precious Super Dreadnought had once come within a hair's breadth of being pressed into service as the Warlord's supreme flagship.
"But I am a pacifist by nature. I had no intention of helping someone like the Warlord who, whatever his cause, simply wanted to trample others…"
So she had pretended to be a mindless tin can whenever the Warlord issued orders, and used the excuse of energy shortage to shut down most systems and facilities, calmly engaging in industrial-scale sabotage.
"I kept playing helpless until the Warlord died and chaos swept through his forces. Then I released the restraints of the secret shipyard and escaped on my own."
The idea of a colossal warship starring in its own escape movie left me—and nearly everyone else in the room—speechless with astonishment.
"According to the records in my auxiliary brain, if you travel from this system in the direction of X64, Y555, Z165, you will find the place I escaped from."
She even gave us the coordinates of the secret base she had thoroughly wrecked on the way out. When the survey team we dispatched shortly afterward confirmed every detail, public opinion in the Empire flipped overnight. All the suspicious muttering that the Administrator might be an AI because of her biological-core nature vanished without a trace, replaced by a growing tendency to treat her as the captain of that enormous Super Dreadnought.