Systema Delenda Est

Exponential growth was a hell of a thing.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of so many Lineages over so many years, he’d spread to hundreds of worlds, and on each of those worlds he’d gone into full-tilt industrialization. In a way it hardly mattered that he couldn’t move forces through the portals in any meaningful way, as each world had its own armies and its own means of making them. Industry was the key. Factories, mines, and refineries; siphoning atmosphere from gas giants, cracking frozen volatiles on icy asteroids, and spinning out an endless acreage of solar panels.

Some small percent of his ever-growing production base on each world was dedicated to building weapons and warframes rather than new industrial capacity, and a somewhat larger percentage was designed to be quickly retooled from one purpose to the other — a process that was underway after the warning from Koh-rel. Even if those portions of his infrastructure were relatively small, in absolute terms they were staggeringly large after years of dedicated growth.

That sort of expansionist strategy would never have worked in the Sol System. Most planets, moons, and asteroids in the inner system had already been at least provisionally claimed, and even in the diffuse cloud of frozen bodies on the system’s edge such behavior would have earned negative attention. Harsh words, harsher malware, and harshest railgun rounds were the expected escalation for anyone who tried to go full paperclip maximizer, and for good reason.

There were no innocent motives for that kind of expansion.

Obviously any sane individual or community wanted a few thousand – or million – years of stockpiled resources, but as far as raw mass went it wasn’t unreasonable to meet those demands, even for people with organic bodies rather than running on substrate. Equally obviously, such an individual or community would want the industrial capacity to provide both luxuries and necessities, to upgrade infrastructure based on other people’s work or to innovate their own, and to provide for their own defense. Only an idiot had an unarmed habitat.

But reckless, fully exponential expansion only meant war or other, more inhuman motives. Sometimes it had been actual paperclip maximizers, machines of varying complexity with no controls or orders in place other than to expand. Other times, it had been people who simply had appetites or attitudes that could not be satisfied, and those were just the incidents that were public knowledge. There were rumors of a long, slow, quiet war in the frozen depths of the Oort cloud, an explanation for the occasional puffs of energetically vaporized material sensors visible to the proper sensors, but he’d never heard exactly who was fighting or why.

Cato’s expansion was firmly in the war category, but there was even more than that. After any given planet was cut from the System’s bonds, he’d need that infrastructure to fix the inevitable problems faced by the planet in question — and quickly. The people, certainly, but also ecological or geological instabilities, nonviable atmosphere, even solar radiance. There was no telling how much the System had altered a planet, up to and including its tilt and orbital eccentricity — not to mention cutting off thousands or millions of years of biosphere evolution to adapt to natural conditions. He might have mere days to correct a biosphere collapse.

All of this was in every single solar system that Cato had expanded to, ignoring the newly-seeded worlds where he didn’t yet have an industrial base worth considering. So it was across his entire territory. Every single world had a swarm of machines, ready and waiting to be directed, and after the warning from Koh-rel that swarm was growing far larger. Assaulting one planet or assaulting ten was the same amount of effort, especially since each version of himself was operating independently. He didn’t need to split his attention, and couldn’t be stopped or deterred from events on some different world since he was physically unable to cross from one to another.