Dark Fate, Chapter 190

Chapter 190 – Future Plans

With the basic skeleton of a deal in place, we moved on to actual numbers. There was some back and forth, there, but, eventually, we settled on a final deal. North Korea would be getting a full squadron of X-Pattern Hunters, and multiple squadrons of Outlaws. Right now, they’d be getting two squadrons of the Outlaw-T transports, two squadrons of the Outlaw-SM military shuttles, one squadron of the Outlaw-M medevacs, and a half-squadron of Outlaw-SC civilian shuttles, plus a special Outlaw-SM configured as a VIP transport for the Leader’s personal use. Oh, and eight thousand of the shield ‘upgrade kits’ for the vehicles they already had.

That, combined with the two-year lease for the construction equipment needed to build their first lunar colony, came to a very substantial sum. Fortunately, Ceres needed resources more than cash. There would be a big supply of materials that were easier to procure on Earth, or at least in Earth’s dungeons, than they were in the asteroid belt, which I fully intended to use to help bolster my own fleet, as well as breaking ground on the Ganymede colony, which should happen next month.

I hadn’t paid too much attention to the colony project, honestly, but I wasn’t worried. There were some standard templates that new colonies tended to fall into, and they were available on the System Shop. Turns out, once you limited things to human-sized bipedal mammals as the primary occupants, most people tend to need the same things, so loading up a colony template based on your atmospheric needs and the environment you were putting the colony down in was the cheapest and most effective way to go. The most difficult part of the Ganymede project was deciding whether or not to try and terraform the moon and living on the surface possible.

Terraforming (or world-shaping, as the System Shop called it) a moon was not a simple procedure. In the case of Ganymede, there was a thin atmosphere already, but the planet would need more mass to retain an atmosphere that was thick enough for humans to breathe unassisted. More mass would also add to the gravity, which was only 0.146g, or less than 15% of Earth’s gravity. And that didn’t even begin to deal with the temperatures, where the hottest it got was NEGATIVE 158 Fahrenheit!

Oh, sure, it could be done. Space magic and the System made it possible. The question was whether spending the resources on this was a good idea or not. And this was the kind of thing that needed to be decided before putting a population on the planet, since starting world-shaping procedures on an inhabited world made things… well, let’s just say that they would be ‘quite uncomfortable’ would be like saying a Category 5 hurricane was ‘a bit wet and windy’.

Finally, I decided not to go through that expense. There were better things to occupy my time and resources. The proposed buildings for the Ganymede colony would be capable of withstanding the atmosphere and micrometeorite impacts, especially once the shield generators were installed. Artificial gravity, like we had on the ships, would make it so people could live their lives on Ganymede without suffering from the degradation caused by long-term microgravity exposure.

Some of the other problems caused by living in an enclosed space like this colony were already being solved. Sunlamps would help people avoid getting cabin fever or dealing with vitamin D deficiencies. Multivitamins would also help cover for other things.

For scrubbing CO2 out of the atmosphere, a hybrid system was planned. Magical air purifiers were the first line of defense, followed by mechanical scrubbers, with candles that released oxygen when lit as a failsafe. This was on top of the hydroponic gardens which would help provide food for the colony, and a proposed park under a dome, which would have plenty of greenery, while giving people someplace to be out ‘in the open’, without actually needing a space suit. The plants would help pull CO2 out of the air just like they did on Earth, which would stretch how long emergency measures could last, if the magical scrubbers went offline for any reason.

After atmospheric controls, power was the next big issue. You couldn’t run all the machinery necessary to keep a colony going without power, after all. Ambient mana meant that there was a constant, low-level power feed that could be tapped into to run some of the machines, but that would not be enough to truly sustain a colony until the population grew enough that dungeons started to form on Ganymede. Which meant we needed power plants.

Fortunately, power plants were something that both humans and the System knew how to do. Even better, through more science and space magic that I didn’t have enough degrees to understand, Jupiter was chock full of different fuels that could be used to keep those reactors running with a minimum of fuss. Fuels that I already had automated mining platforms siphoning from the Jovian atmosphere, since they were what powered Ceres itself.

Running down the list of other potential issues the colony would run into, most of them were easily handled with systems that had already been designed. Growing food was simple enough. Hydroponics were already something humans understood before the System. But what about the non-vegans? Well, the System had an answer for that: cloning.

Cloning tech under the System was weird. You could clone replacement limbs and organs for transplants. You could grow a side of beef in a vat. But trying to clone live beings required special materials or magics, and the clones did not react well if you tried to ‘quick-grow’ them to adulthood. So, instead of having a body double or blank slate copy of your body you could download your consciousness into if your old body broke down, you were left with a baby the equivalent of six months old, who had to grow up the ‘normal’ way.

This meant that clone armies, or a flash-grown, programmed body double of some political figure controlled by a shadowy conspiracy, and other staples of science fiction were firmly off the table. Robot or drone armies were a thing, but without specialized skills and commanders, they were vulnerable to hacking and logic errors, making them not particularly useful for anything except battles of attrition. Throwing unending hordes at someone until they ran out of bullets was a strategy that had won battles on Earth, even before the System. Likewise, doppelgangers in a more conventional sense (whether an actual shapeshifter, or someone using magical or mundane disguises) were a legitimate threat, so I couldn’t say that fiction writers had completely failed us.

Still, food, water, shelter, breathable air. Everything a habitat absolutely needed was accounted for. As for what the colony would do? There would be plenty of space for industrial concerns on the moon, and a lot of room for my armed forces to train in. Beyond that, I wasn’t going to put too many controls on the colony. I didn’t micromanage Ceres, and I wasn’t going to micromanage its colonies, either. I’d make sure a governor was there, who would answer to me. But otherwise? Unless whatever the colony was doing ran counter to the laws of the kingdom, then I wasn’t going to meddle more than I absolutely had to.

The only additions to the ‘standard colony template’ I needed to make was adding in a dueling arena, so that Ceresan law could be properly administered on the colony, and creating a transport pad. I didn’t want travel or commerce between Ceres and her first colony to be hampered, so I had my people design a teleport circle, like the one I used to get to my ‘embassy’ in Atlanta, and put it in an expanded space on Ceres. As more colonies were added throughout the system, they would all have a circle that would come back to this room, making it something of a transit hub.

Of course, I knew that just making it so that people could walk from Ceres to Ganymede in moments wouldn’t negate the need for shuttles and transports. Manufactured goods in any kind of bulk would need to be moved the normal way, and there would always be people who preferred flying to instant travel. Not to mention that I intended to make sure that the circles only worked for citizens of Ceres who had signed System contracts.

That last bit was important, after all. It was only a week or so since the last assassination attempt on me, and if some of these idiots found a loophole to bring a bomb in without enslaving themselves, like that one bunch of morons, I knew they’d do it in a heartbeat. I was powerful enough that the only person on Earth or Ceres that could actually hurt me, and wasn’t already my slave or somehow bound to me, was a privateer who was begrudgingly happy with how I’d taken care of her wife and so had no reason to try and kill me, now that I’d given her a path to buying her wife’s freedom and was sponsoring some big upgrades for her squid-ship.

Which brought up a good point. I had a well-deserved reputation by now for being a literal sex demon who solved many problems by literally fucking women into drooling puddles of desire. When I wasn’t going on murderous rampages, slaughtering anyone who came at me with ease. Those who knew me, knew that I wasn’t pointlessly cruel to those who hadn’t done anything to me, or offered me any insult. They also knew that I didn’t just fuck any pretty woman who met my gaze, either. My meeting with the North Korean premier made it clear that I needed to start promoting the more… gentlemanly side of my reputation.

I needed someone to manage my public relations image. So far, I’d been coasting on the fact that the kind of people who came to Ceres didn’t care about the stuff people back on Earth did. They LIKED that I wasn’t your typical stuffed shirt politician. That I acted like a real person, who didn’t give a shit what some talking head thought about me. That appealed to a lot of them.

However, I couldn’t rely on just that. After all, eventually I was going to have to actually do diplomacy stuff with other nations, and I needed to have a reputation as being someone who would make a deal. The North Korean stuff was part of that. A little bit of friendship and mutually beneficial support to a country that was used to being treated like an annoyance, even by their so-called allies, all while actively helping people in the country? I’d seen the poll numbers, and the only person more popular than me in that country was Leader Oh, herself. Treating them as a friend, as an equal, made Ceres wildly popular with the North Korean people.

Other countries wouldn’t be so easy to deal with, however. Oh, sure, there were plenty of third-world shitholes I could go to, and pull much the same deal with them as I had with the DPRK. Shore up industry, make sure people get fed, and treat them like actual people, rather than resources. Boom, any little country in Africa, South America, or Southeast Asia would love me. But that would only help with those little countries. And if I looked to be empire-building on Earth, then I’d have the actual Powers That Be start looking to try and interfere with things. Especially if my only reputation was, “If you get in my way, you’re either getting fucked or fucked up.”

Yes, that was a catchy slogan, and I did want to promote that image, especially since the end of the Palestine-Israel thing. People knew that I was able to bring the pain, and, more importantly, they knew that I not only had the will to do it, but that they would be hard-pressed to give me any consequences if or when I did it again. So that was a nice, big stick. Two, if you counted the one in my pants. Now, I needed to work on the ‘speak softly’ part of the Teddy Roosevelt quote, and start showing people that I played well with those who were willing to play with me.

I looked at my calendar. The General Assembly of the United Nations was slated to start their annual meeting in a couple months. Perhaps I should pay them a visit? Maybe see what kind of fun I could get up to? I ought to ask Leader Oh if she could arrange something while she was here.