Chapter 5: Collateral Damage
Dealing with gods took up a lot of attention.
Cato-Ikent was only the second version to have that privilege, and it made him just as busy as his Urivan counterpart — not that he was about to inform either Mii-Es or Initik about the other’s cooperation. Trust was a fragile thing and there was no telling what politics were at play. Initik had clear motivations and handles; Mii-Es seemed to enjoy the social game of veiled questions, hints, and trading favors. Or, perhaps, she was simply desperately lonely.
He had yet to see another one of her species anywhere in the System, when he’d even spotted a few high-rank Sydeans scattered around the various worlds. Some of the hints she’d dropped in their conversations implied that, like Initik, she’d risen to her station from Copper, rather than being born into it like the Core Clans. So somewhere out there was her home planet, but it might have suffered the same fate as some that he’d seen, where the natives couldn’t handle the System. Whether it was because of malevolent gods or because the apocalypse destroyed so much there wasn’t enough of a civilization and people left to survive.
That was one thing that he’d pinged his various selves to actively look for. Just because he was spread over hundreds of thousands of worlds didn’t mean that every scrap of information was available everywhere at all times. He simply didn’t have the bandwidth for that.
Of more immediate concern was the list, which was almost worth being capitalized, of vulnerable worlds and gods. Obviously he couldn’t tell which worlds were Clan-owned and which weren’t on his own, but with the list he was able to establish a small if statistically significant trend toward higher infrastructure. It wasn’t universal; a few of the worlds were practically undeveloped. But he could see the patterns where some frontier worlds were being treated as fringe territories, whereas others had people invested in their well-being.
Projected onto a map, it was clear that the clans had staked out the main thoroughfares of portal connections, mostly relegating the independent gods to small pockets and dead ends. It seemed like the Clans weren’t trying to completely push independent gods off their claims – Cato could imagine that Initik would put the hurt on anyone that tried with his world, for example – but they were also geographically isolated to prevent any kind of power bloc from forming.
Clearly that hadn’t worked, if he understood Mii-Es correctly. He would have loved to be able to negotiate with the alliance of small gods himself, because he really didn’t have any problems with saving any System-God that had the welfare of the populace in mind, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet, at any rate.
On each of those listed worlds he did bring forces in closer, just in case. Some of them, particularly in the inner worlds, had scant presence to begin with and he tasked those Lineages using jager frames with launching more material there. It could cut potentially years off the start-up time, mostly by circumventing some of the issues with the sheer amount of travel necessary to start significant infrastructure across multiple planetary bodies. The details would be an optimization problem for the Cato in question, but more mass made things more efficient across a multitude of domains.
For others, he had orbital forces ready, and there was a bit of worry that a few billion tons of material would be visible that close to the planet, but if Mii-Es was honest these types would have the most to lose. They were the ones most likely to suffer from any purge the Core Worlds decided to enact, and probably the most incentive to turn away from the System. Not that he planned to invade, not yet. He still had no idea how to deal with the Core, nor the worlds where features like floating mountains meant that there would be planetary-scale devastation no matter what.