Debauchery x Division 12 (Patreon)

Commissioned

Debauchery x Division

Chapter 12

-VB-

Cooperland

3021.01.24

With almost a hundred clones working together along with tools, equipment, and vehicles needed to disassemble a ship, we took close to a week to take the thing apart, and that was with all of my powers working at play to make the disassembly easier! 

At the same time, I also had a squad of clones try to get proficient at flying the Kraken and managed to become decent enough of a carrier flyer. I also began to use drones instead of actual manned fighters, because that would be a better allocation of resources.

After all, a single one of my clones possessed a swiss army knife of abilities that made it more valuable than half a dozen manned and industrial  mining equipment, factory machines, and transportation vehicles. Putting a clone inside of a fighter? That was a waste! After all, a single clone could make a drone fighter every few hours. In the span of time a clone might spend traveling to a battlefield, fighting, and coming back alive in this universe, a clone at home would have produced hundreds of drone fighters. Or thousands of kamikaze drones. 

So the disassembly and reverse engineering was going well. 

Flying and getting flight experience was going well. 

What was not going well was our attempt at reducing the size of a KF Drive’s mass ratio. The clones and the twins working on the issue had run into a roadblock, and the name of that roadblock was construction speed and experimentation opportunities.

While we possessed high end computers the likes of which the Inner Sphere, the Periphery, and even the Clans didn’t have and were fit for thousands of simulations, I did not possess a titanium-germanium drive factory and was reduced to having a group of five clones handcraft the shit. 

Yes, handcraft a core that weighed a minimum of ten thousand tons by hand. And the other bottleneck was the fact that each experimental design differed from each other, so we couldn’t even reuse the titanium and germanium we used in other drive cores without some serious recycling and purification, neither of which were part of our powers and relied on machines, which was another bottleneck for a fucking bottleneck. And soon, we would approach the final bottleneck: our reserves of titanium and germanium were running low.

If we didn’t have our Minecraft powers, then this would have been impossible and it made sense why no one else in the Inner Sphere bothered to experiment. Last I checked with the pirates, pure germanium was close to a thousand C-Bills per kilo, but no one in a 200 lightyear radius had more than a few dozen tons of the stuff. 

Mining worlds had raw germanium, though.

It would be easier for me to raid those worlds for the raw germanium than to keep mining inefficiently on this germanium-poor world. 

Which was why I asked my pirate visitors that I would be more than willing to buy raw germanium at market value if they ever looted them from Davion worlds. 

It was a two birds for one stone deal for me; it deprived the Federated Suns of their germanium while stocking me up on the FTL-critical metal.

---

Cooperland Port

“You want me to do what?” 

When George Reisen had been called back to the baron’s office, he had not expected more work, especially so soon after returning. 

Normally, a “privateer” crew such as his would get a raid done, spend a month or two traveling, then spend another month getting things fixed up in their chosen port, and then go back out there to do more raiding. Most of their targets would be targets of opportunity as well. 

“Attack and loot germanium mines out there in the Outbacks, captain,” the baron smiled as if he hadn’t just asked him to do something ridiculous. 

The Outback was an underdeveloped shithole only good for being victims, yes, but that wasn’t the case with germanium mines. Germanium mines came with their own security that was separate from the planetary militia. Often times, those security had mechs that …

…Who was he kidding? He was working with a man who made mechs that outdid anything he’s ever seen. He just came back from a rain that put to shame anything he’s ever encountered on his own. So what if the baron wanted to fuck over the Davions by attacking their germanium mines? That wasn’t skin off his teeth. He’s just the transport. 

“To that end…” the baron continued, making him focus back on the noble. “I have a surprise for you. Call it an … escort, if you will.”

And that’s how he found out that the the baron somehow got his hands on a weird ass mini-jumpship, which was meant for battle and acted as a carrier for aerospace fighters. 

He called it the Kraken. It would be crewed by the baron’s clones, so the minimum George had to do was carry the baron’s dropship around with his jumpship, because the Kraken didn’t have any jump collar nor could it carry any dropship, not even a Leopard. 

And this made George realized something. 

His value as a captain was depreciating very quickly.

-VB-

Cooperland

3021.01.25

I offered it to my girls out of nowhere. 

“You want to give us … a superpower?” Tina asked while Wiska looked surprised. 

“Yes,” I replied. “It feels … like I’m cheaping out by not giving you something when I could.” 

“Why us?” Wiska asked. When I looked at her after her question, I didn’t see any resentment or any other negative emotion. It was simply curiosity. 

And I got it. 

Tina and Wiska knew  that their value in my “empire,” so to speak, no longer included their engineering skills and knowledge; the templates of both Caede Celeste and Kelbor-Hal outpaced them by literal millennias. Whatever they could do and think of, I already better something better for it. 

If I had to be blunt as possible, then they weren’t worth much beside their current roles as future mothers to my children and bedwarmers. 

Then was it sentimentality?

That was Wiska’s question beyond the obvious surface level inquiry. 

“I consider myself a fair person,” I replied after a long while. “And though, technically, I own you less as a person and more as objects because of what I am, a Contractor of the Waifu Company, you two are still people who put in the time to help me grow my little empire and keep myself accompanied. If nothing else, then your help deserve a proportional reward to what you helped me create. I now own a planet. Giving both of you a superpower each is fair and justified. Besides, it isn’t as if you are leaving me.”

The twins glanced at each other before nodding. 

Then Tina grinned. “I want to be a hammer wielding warrior!” 

“I’m more worried about illnesses and the like. Is there a fantasy healer that I can have in there somewhere?” 

I chuckled. “There are. Wiska, I’ll give you your healer superpower first. A Priest-class from Warcraft,” I hummed as I gave her exactly what she wanted with a few swipes of my fingertips on the screen of my Company phone. And if it had additional functions like mind control and blasting holy magic at people, then she lucked out, no? 

“When will I get mine?” Tina asked, slightly bouncing in her seat.

I grinned. “You will get yours…”

Her bouncing intensified. 

“A month from now. Sorry.”

She froze in disbelief before sagging in dejection. 

“At least you’ll have more time to think about what you want, right?” 

“I guess…” she pouted.

Wiska giggled at her twin sister’s demeanor. 

“Wait,” Tina perked up. “How many of these superpowers do you have, anyway?”

“Well, there’s Minecraft Steve. It’s what lets me dig so quickly and store so many things in so small a space. After that, there’s Dupli-Kate, Ernesti, Panacea, Celeste, and Kelbor-Hal. Only Dupli-Kate, Steve, and Panacea are truly supernatural. I got Ernesti, Celeste, and Kelbor-Hal for each of their expertise. Ernesti is the one who designs mechs. Celeste has super tech. Kelbor-Hal was the head of an intergalactic machine cult.”

Both of the sisters stared at me. 

“Machine cult.”

I nodded. “Complete with candles, rituals, prayers, and human recycling.”

Both Tina and Wiska were horrified when I told them about how the Imperium maintained their equipment and made some of them. 

The servitors… living mainframes… so on and so forth. 

They wished they didn’t know, and told me very firmly that they didn’t want to see any of the “dirty” tech. I agreed easily enough. It wasn’t as if servitors and the like were useful to me. 

-VB-

Eustatius III

3021.02.21

Reisen whistled as he watched the live feed of the battle happening below. 

A month ago, he got a “request” from the baron to take his force out on raids on Davion germanium mines. Close to a month later, he was deep inside the FedSuns, getting paid to just transport the baron’s menacing army while he stayed in orbit in case his dropship was needed to transport more goods than the baron can handle. 

And the baron’s “Kraken” was laying waste to the local garrison and reserve with his mechs and weird aerospace fighters. 

When the baron sent him off with the Kraken in tow, the Kraken had six aerospace fighters and two dozen of those Clover mechs. 

Now, those Clovers tore apart the defenders.

He winced as he watched the current battle on his grainy screen. The baron’s had ambushed the defenders who had been on their way to reinforce another location. Now, that reinforcement of two mech lances and two armored lances fought for their lives against a dozen Clovers.

One Clover pushed down a Wasp to the ground and tore open the cockpit with its mouth. Then it bit down on the mechwarrior who had been too slow to escape. 

Blood splattered everywhere as the mechwarrior’s comrades watched… and the Clovers eerily turned to look at the other mechs. 

The Clovers, which looked way too human except for their dog-like heads, stood in a way that didn’t speak of mechwarriors fighting to win a battle but of hungry men who found fresh meat. 

And they butchered Davion mechs with their knives in a horrifying massacre. 

George imagined himself trying to run from the baron’s grasp, and finding a lance of those Clovers standing outside wherever he hid. He could only imagine them shoving their arms into buildings and pulling out whatever got caught in their grasp. And like monsters, they would shovel them into their mouths. 

He knew that it was an intimidation tactics. Those mechs weren’t alive like flesh and blood humans, but goddamn if their more human-like contours and shape didn’t make it seem convincing. Hell, if he was on the ground right there, then he might be convinced that those mechs actually went out of their way to eat people.

And … And …

…

Were they actually eating people? He couldn’t tell because his screen was too grainy but -.

He stopped and stared at one mech in particular. 

‘Did that thing’s neck move? Like it was swallowing?’

… No way, right? 

SQUEEEEEE!

He jumped in his seat and swerved around while cussing out whoever just rang the alarm.

“What?!” he shouted across the bridge. 

“Captain, we’ve got two Unions burning down to the ground! They didn’t even bother to hail us!”

“Their IFF?!” 

“... More Davions. Islamabad Crucis March Militia, 2nd Company.” 

George’s eyebrows rose up. “Where the fuck did they come from?”

No, wait. That wasn’t the issue. 

He quickly turned to look at the baron’s clone who had been stationed on his dropship. Instead of power armor that the other clones wore the first time they boarded his ship, this clone only wore casual clothes that gave away nothing of his station, wealth, or … inhumane nature.

“I’ve already sent the alert to my ‘family,’” the clone smiled. 

George shuddered. 

Those Davions had no idea what they were up against.