Angel Eye: The Fifth Sign

[Jorga the Hutt]

Imagine you're in a schoolyard playing rock-paper-scissors, and someone throws in another sign that beats everything. Do you kick him out of the game? Maybe. Or do you make a fifth sign?

Now imagine you've scrambled your way up from a pawn shop's basement dungeon. You grab a baseball bat, a hammer, a chainsaw -- trading up as you go -- but then you see a sword, and you know this is the one. And you go downstairs and cut a fool.

Escalation is only human, and if you can get out of recursive superiority (line fighters beat interceptors, interceptors beat bombers, bombers beat capital escorts, capital escorts beat line fighters -- that kind of thing), you instantly gain two things. Power, and notoriety. To some extent they amplify each other: notoriety can be a kind of power, or at least can enhance it, and there's no need to go into how power can make you more notorious.

So is it worth it to be the best, to such an extent that it's flat-out unfair? The ancients have handed down a wise answer.

Size doesn't matter. It's how you use it.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Grab your katanas and drop your rock-paper-scissors, because we're going for a ride past probability and fairness. We're going for Velok-scale audacity, Shorn-level presumption, Cavill-style ambition. We're going to take a leak on the balance of power on our way out of the building, because we're talking about a patchwork edifice built from oneupmanship. That edifice got all wobbly near the top, and a lot of folks at the bottom don't know there's more stories above, so they get whiney anytime someone's got the high ground on them, as if they've got a right to be able to counter everything, be aware of everything. I mean, let me be honest, maybe this little trip of ours is going to make us just one more one-up, one more story tacked on to the top of a building that's been wobbling for a while. Or maybe we're going so far outside it that it's time to build something new. Something that screws everyone equally.

In the beginning there were the basic systems. You can stretch those pretty far, admittedly, and they're good on a budget, but if you want the genuine article, you need a paradigm shift. Because that first battlefield was its own little rock-paper-scissors of recursiveness -- better systems, better countermeasures, better systems, better countermeasures. Stimulus, response, all innovations constrained by the channels that predecessors proscribed. In the grand scheme of things, a bronze sword will still shear through leather armor and kill you dead, but things have moved on a little.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

What does a man owe his country? You know the answers as well as I do, and if you've got alternate ideas for me, I've got a pat on the head for you. Where it gets complicated, where it gets interesting, is when a man owes multiple allegiances. When he's in moral debt and obligation to two flags, when he believes in both to a large extent, when betrayal is outside his basic programming (thanks, Hagron), and when those flags are occasionally in conflict.

Good thing I've got a brain enough to keep half of that allegiance quiet. I'm known as a sympathizer but my old life, my old identity, isn't relevant to the letters that bracket my name on the door.

I've been known to sate the demands of conscience by working for someone who, at least in part, works for both. I've spent the better part of a decade doing special projects contracts for EDY to keep my mind sharp. Since I've gone respectable, I generally bill those sequestered sojourns as fundraisers -- EDY is a major campaign contributor.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

And EDY makes the Republic's command ships. And the Mandalorians' construction vehicles. On EDY's say-so, I've built the galaxy's first cloaked capital ship -- and the galaxy's first gravitic-attuned command ship to complement it. That was a peace dream. A little obsolete, and a little redundant since the gravitics won't cover stealth ships the Republic never built itself. In the rock-paper-scissors of detection technology, the Shev'la Kal and the MC180 Remembrance are both incomplete puzzle pieces, stronger together than alone, but the odds that they'll ever serve alongside each other are vanishingly slim. At least I got to build them, so that's something.

More to the point, I get to help maintain them, upgrade them. The Republic trusts me with gravitic tech like you wouldn't believe -- and the Republic's gravitic tech isn't even that impressive. The Remembrance has a crystal gravfield trap and a gravitic amplitude modulator (but you better believe no Republic commander has ever glimpsed the possibilities of that combination). Compared to the Haytham-class TAG LAW prototypes I built for Silk with Warren Valik, the Republic's gravitic tech is obsolete.

Did I mention I still have access to the TAG LAW black room?

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

I've sat back for a long time, been a passive participant in the same pattern of oneupmanship that's persisted since the New Republic. Stealth is good; hibridium is better, when you've got two brain cells to rub together. Thrust trace dampers or a ballistic trajectory, playing deadly Isaac with your whole ship until you get where you're going. Hibridium is double-blind, and while, sure, that's a liability, it took...

...well, me...


...to spot the advantages. Ever drop a hibridium-cloaked ship on a command bunker? Bubble overlaps the transmitters or land lines, command bunker's cut off both in and out. That's one Mando tactic we keep quiet, though it worked well on Muunilinst back in the day. Suffice it to say, I've got a fondness for hibridium over and above its availability.

Because the next tier up is stygium, single-blind. Every sample I know comes from the infinitely-pillaged Aeten system or the minimal-and-tightly-controlled Maramere. And when I say minimal, I mean that Maramere's whole deposit is the result of one ancient bulk freighter crash.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

But hibridium and stygium both get trumped by the crystal gravfield trap. The CGT is a wonder of subtlety. I understand it, but I couldn't have invented it; it's that good. It's rare, rare, rare, rare, rare. There've been times when there were only three in the whole galaxy. Then along came the Sith Empire's Monitor-class surveillance corvette, its 'Monitor-X' sensor suite complete with gravitics, and that ship was everywhere. It was designed to combat Mandalorian stealth fighters, but it ended up delegitimizing cloaking devices across the board, and wasn't that a mess. In desperation for cloaking devices to actually mean something, various enterprising inventors reclaimed and reworked the humble gravitic modulator, the only piece of gear capable of trumping a CGT and allowing a cloak to function as an actual cloak.

The ultimate stealth ship has a stygium cloak, a gravitic modulator, and thrust trace dampers or a tibannaX drive. I built the very first one, totally unarmed, out of a medical ship. It's called Liberty's Veil, and it's home to the deadliest woman alive. Since then, a good few ships have followed that trifecta model, ascribed to that holy trinity of stealth. Stygium, gravitics, TTDs. For the Remembrance, I one-upped that in turn -- a powerful gravitic amplitude modulator meant to jam others' CGTs and provide cover for stealth ships that, once again, the Republic doesn't have.

I suppose I can admit now that the full scope of the Remembrance's tactical utility didn't occur to me at the time. As nobody else has spotted it, though, I suppose I'm in the clear.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

That won't always be the case. There will be fury and blood and I'm sure CEC will try to copy my work inside a week, but this project took me a good while and it should take them the same. Also mine will look better.

Regardless of whether people rip off my idea, though, the impact will be significant. Passionate repercussions. I feel limited sympathy for those who predicate their safety on anything but their minds, because anything can be countered. Subverted. Taken away. I mean to pull the rug out from under a good few people and make them bleed for their complacency.

See, a man gets motivated when his girl gets kidnapped by Sith Lords. When her eyelids get cut off, her eye gouged out, her wrists truncated with extreme prejudice. A man gets motivated when he spends his time making her better hands, patching her mind together, pulling her focus out of wherever it's been. A man gets motivated on the other side of a suicide attempt and the realization that he has the means to kill everyone.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

Enough perambulation and circumnavigation. Here's where it gets fun.

Imagine, if you will, a hard link between a crystal gravfield trap and a gravitic amplitude modulator. We're already talking massive expense here, don't get me wrong, but the real joy of it is that this still falls under the TAG LAW aegis, which had a literal blank check. Sure, it means Silk/EDY will own the rights to this, but I know their customer list, and I'm fine with it. I'm also fine with no recognition. This project has to stay quiet, has to, for it to work.

So say you've got a CGT linked to a GAM, and that GAM starts wailing random graviton signals as it does when it's trying to jam out yammosks. Now say -- and I've tested this extensively -- that gravitic modulators within the GAM's jamming zone are forced to make numerous minute adjustments in order to compensate for the graviton chatter. Small ones only, but necessary to avoid showing up on a CGT somewhere, even for a moment. Because most CGTs are, all told, big-picture things that devote all their processing power to sorting out gravitic contacts.

But say this whole thing was small. Dogfighting scale. Say a compact high-functioning processor is enough to manage a combined CGT/GAM with an effective range of only a kilometre or so. Say those gravitic modulators take a tiny fraction of a second to adjust to the GAM's blanket coverage.

(Yes, this would allow very, very localized yammosk jamming. No, this isn't the point.)

Now say that the CGT is closely enough linked to the GAM that it knows what randomized graviton noise the GAM is about to throw out -- and the CGT is watching. The high-end processor catches that tiny fraction of a second. Over and over and over again.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

In the end, the missing 1% was my suit, the Baktoid/Praestigia Gravitational Leveler. It's an interesting and useful example of localized gravity control, and localized is the order of the day. This project is something of an interpolation of scale between the suit and the TAG LAW, which has an average effective radius an order of magnitude higher than what I'm after. I do mean that in the technical sense -- the TAG LAW has variable gravitic control for roughly ten kilometres in all directions, and one kilometre is my goal for this project. It's a matter of finding the optimization point between processor capacity, power-of-three expansion, and diminishing returns. And I can make all the mathematical models I want, but there's no substitute for the field. I've spent easily seven figures of Silk's money on prototypes, some of them far too ambitious.

I was wasting my time trying to curse individuals. I was wasting my time gunning for specific faces. I'm going to curse them all. I can't help it; I'm past lassitude, depression, helplessness. I'm trying to help Mia in every way I can think of, from weapons to comfort to sex to gadgets, but this one, right here...this'll make her smile.

 

[Jorga the Hutt]

The final product is an advanced sensor suite, a big one for this kind of scale. The primary delivery method of choice can fit three advanced systems, normally, but this will count as two, for space and power requirements -- it's that profoundly nasty. It's also a combination of two components that have never been miniaturized to this extent. The sucker needs its own processor, and a good one, and that should tell you something serious.

But when the GAM sings, the CGT compensates, filters out the GAM's waveform, and spots microsecond anomalies. The kind of anomalies that show up when a gravitic modulator tries to adjust to compensate for proximity to an active GAM. It turns out that a gravitic modulator plus a GAM plus local mass disturbances can even make tiny, shallow, short-term Lagrange points, and those are extremely telling. The CGT loves those. They're great for eliminating false positives.

Started strong, didn't I? But this is the substance, the result. Not so much the flash and dazzle, granted, but matters of style have their place. This isn't a palace I've built; this is a watchtower.