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***
* Naboo, Tid, Tyber *
Today was a normal day at work. After kissing my wife sitting with my son in the morning, I went downstairs.
We had a two-storey house, with spacious bright rooms lit by natural light from the large windows. A big bed, two bedrooms and spacious corridors, all of which had become familiar.
On the ground floor was an art supplies shop. Selling rare items that artists turn into works of art - paints, canvases of different materials, stone slabs for bas-reliefs and semi-precious stones for mosaics, all this brought a steady and good income. I had no complaints about my life, and considering my second job... But no one on Naboo knew about it but me, not even my wife.
It was a normal day - customers came into the shop, checking out and buying things. I don't have many customers, but they're regulars - since the academy opened an art club, there are more customers.
The usual working day was interrupted by a call on the comlink. After looking at the number, I immediately closed the shop and went downstairs to the basement. Where I kept the paints, and behind the paints there was another small pantry of five square metres. The pantry was a communications centre.
- Do you copy? - asked a heavily computer-altered voice from the communicator.
- Tyber here," I answered, checking that the door was closed.
- Good afternoon, Tyber. This is Cinna.
- I'm listening," I answered immediately.
- Our employer wishes you to approach the Queen of Naboo as soon as possible.
- What?" I blurted out, "the queen?
- Exactly. Don't interrupt me. It will be organised without your involvement. The queen will hire a full-time artist to be part of her entourage. The artist will require you to attend with him as his apprentice and technician. You know about material supplies, don't you?
- Quite right," I replied, worried, "but....
- Your history is clean, so after security checks, you'll enter the Queen's retinue. The task is the same as before. Observe, report. No action as an agent. And keep in mind that sometimes the queen puts a double in her place and hides under the guise of a maid.
- I'll keep that in mind," I nodded to the communicator.
- And one more thing... - said the Voice thoughtfully, - you will be transferred the sum of two hundred thousand credits as a lifting allowance. As far as I know, on Naboo it's customary to treat your colleagues to a drink to fit in. The rest you can consider an advance for the work.
- Yes," I nodded into the communicator.
- Over and out," the Voice said and disconnected.
Yeah, well...
* Mandalore *
Two technicians stood worriedly in front of the heavy closed doors in the palace of the Duchess of Mandalore. The standing guards in heavy armour looked at them disapprovingly, but remained still and silent. The old, hinged doors made of heavy wood finally opened... These people had never seen the ruler of the planet so close before, so they stared at the Duchess who came out to them, not forgetting to greet her absentmindedly.
Accompanied by two guards in power armour, the Duchess nodded faintly at the room behind her. The technicians immediately moved into the room, bringing a large box, past the Duchess' guards. One of the many conference rooms in the palace appeared before their eyes, with a large table, couches and armchairs, and a beautiful view from the window. Satine entered the room after the technicians and the guards closed the doors, cutting off the conference room from the outside world.
- What do you have? - Satine asked impatiently.
- My name is Diegis and this is my colleague Rolis," the older man introduced himself, while the younger one was still looking at the Duchess. Satine was not dressed in ceremonial robes - an ordinary skirt, long, but with a big slit, and ordinary, a little baggy clothes, which could not hide a beautiful figure.
- И?
- We're in the middle of something like this... well, a client showed up at MandalMotors recently, with a private order.
- And what made you come to me?
- It's important!" Diegis sighed, "Look," he pulled something that looked like a flower out of a box. Though only remotely, it was something incomprehensible. The model had a metre wingspan, but weighed a little because it was made of duraplast, - here.
- И? - Satine didn't understand.
- This is a new word in the design of small warships! - announced Diegis with a proud look, - a heavy super-maneuverable all-purpose ship!
- Interesting," Satine looked at the model, "it looks beautiful.
- Not only beautiful, but also deadly! - echoed Rolis. Diegis began to explain:
- 'A client brought us this model. Amazingly elaborate. And he has already selected most of the components, put them together and even suggested ordering new, better components. This ship is... incredible. All the wings," Diegis walked over and unfolded the wings, "fold out. What's more, each wing has a manoeuvring engine. This will give the heavy fighter a manoeuvrability that even light fighters could never dream of. Powerful cannons will destroy almost any enemy, and a powerful engine will allow you to get away even from the interceptor and catch up with any ship. Moreover, this ship has two hyperdrives and sophisticated fire control systems!
- I wonder," Satine nodded politely, "what exactly made you come here?
- What did what? - Diegis was surprised, - this ship is at least decades ahead of anything else in existence. In terms of manoeuvrability, survivability, armament... two of them can destroy a light cruiser! It's a whole new word in heavy fighter design. But, alas, according to the contract, all rights to the concept and the fighter itself belong to him," Diegis said sadly.
Satine sat down on the armrest of the sofa, and Rolis hardly took his eyes off the duchess's slender legs with white silky skin and forced himself to think about work. Though his gaze moved away from her.
- So you want to get one for yourself? - After thinking for a moment, the Duchess said.
- Such fighters could make our company famous," Diegis nodded, "it's an incredible combination of heavy defence, speed and firepower. It's true that the price is quite high... but you have to pay for everything. These fighters would be ideal as Guard vehicles to escort important people. They're equipped for long flights. Well, on the scale of fighter jets. Satine thought for a moment...
- 'I wonder,' said the Duchess, 'did the customer provide you with a finished design?
- No... more like a hull model and a list of components - engines, manoeuvring engines, cannons, rocket launcher, shields, reactor, computers, hyperdrives....
- Okay, okay," the Duchess sighed, standing up from the armrest, "why don't you talk to the customer yourself?
- Reputation," Diegis said, "we've already signed a contract, and it's bad form to try to negotiate after we've signed it. Although if maybe you will talk to the customer... especially since we are talking about a really revolutionary model.
- Okay, - sighed Satine, - I'll think of something. Who ordered the car from you?
- Anakin Skywalker," Rolis said. The Duchess's face changed:
- Skywalker? Really? He was on Mandalore?
- The day before yesterday," Diegis enlightened her.
- And he didn't come to see me," Satine frowned, feeling offended, "Oh, come on..." but when she noticed the technicians, she immediately curbed her irritation and said to them, "Dismissed. I promised I'd talk.
The technicians were blown away, and Satine took a quick step back to her chambers. The guards looked at each other and followed her. Satine went into her wing of the palace, where she collapsed on the couch and muttered irritably: "What an arsehole. Flew in and didn't even come in. It's like I'm nothing!". The guards looked at each other and left the grumbling duchess alone, walking out the door.
* * *
Sin Konoth, Minister of Defence of the Koros Empire, former Admiral of the Mandalorian Navy.
* * *
Shin paced from side to side around his office. Most of his armour was lying on the couch in his office - it was uncomfortable to wear it all the time, but he'd left the light one on - tradition. On the desk in front of him were datapads, datacards, papers and a few miniature models of ships he collected. Rubbing the bridge of his nose tiredly, he plopped down in a comfortable chair and began to think. He had long ago been tasked with putting together a good fleet, so he contacted the recruiters who were taking new recruits into the Mandalorian army and put his proposal to them. The maths was simple - a good salary for a soldier was five hundred credits. Training and uniforms were deducted from it for the first few months.
Shin pulled up a datapad and calculated - ten aircraft carriers, twenty heavy cruisers and a hundred corvettes would cost sixty billion a month just for personnel. And the same amount to keep them combat-ready. Of course, not all ships will be kept in full readiness - even a flagship, without the participation of other ships, with the characteristics mentioned to the Emperors, is enough to completely conquer an entire system with a defensive fleet and planetary shields with self-defence forces. And the whole squadron, theoretically, is enough for complete conquest of almost any system. Only the central worlds have dreadnought-class ships, and even then it costs so much money to maintain their nine-thousand-strong crew that it's rare to have more than ten ships of that class.
Shin took another look at the ship models on his desk and sighed heavily - finances were his weakness. How would the Emperor react to the proposal to create such a fleet? Deciding to give up, Shin Konoth left his office and after telling the droid he was out, went to the bridge. He needed good, modern ships for his fiefdom, and the Emperor had only expressed a few wishes. The main work still fell on him and his assistants - to order dozens and hundreds of types of equipment, to draw up specifications for shipbuilders, to contact and agree on construction... It was good that he could assemble a fleet of "gozanti" within a week - they had already been produced hundreds of thousands of pieces, so finding suitable ones would not be a problem, and the training of personnel was minimal. And as a patrol ship, they'd be perfect.
* * *
Julian Cleavian
* * *
The station was enormous, even by galactic standards. At this point, almost all stationary space stations were up to a kilometre in size and were something ship-shaped, converted to fit the stations' needs. The time of miniature ships was gone - it was necessary to provide a huge traffic, so initially the station was planned to be large. Having consulted with Kuat engineers, Julian decided that it would be better to make the station modular, so that if necessary it would be possible to extend or remove a part of it. It consisted of a ten kilometre straight, square-section fuselage. From it, at a distance of one kilometre, docking sections - docks - departed. The arriving transport was divided into ten cargo sections and each of them entered between the two branches, at the same time docking on both sides of the docks. This allowed the transporters to be assembled and disassembled quickly, simultaneously unloading the sections on the left side and loading them on the right side of the station, or even worse, simultaneously unloading and loading shipping containers. On both sides of the station ridge there are two humps - warehouses. From there, cargo can be delivered either by crates by conveyor or by pipes, if it is liquid or bulk. With this arrangement, as Kuat engineers assured, the station will be able to unload a transporter in a week and load bulk cargoes in just a day. The second part of the station was for normal transporters - four docking branches connected to each other. Inside was a gigantic hangar, capable of accommodating even heavy transports like the Acclamator.
Since the construction of the station itself was sectional, and paid for all at once and in full. The Kuat shipyards cleared out all the spare workshops and began production of half of the required segments at once. It would take a month, after which the second half and assembly of the first part would begin immediately. Six months is how long it would take for complete assembly and commissioning.
Julian sat in the cabin of the CR-90 frigate he'd bought for travelling, looking out the panoramic window at the gigantic construction site. Half of the station was finished, a record-breaking construction by galactic standards. Julian was, as usual, a lazy and not very active man, so he preferred to let the others work - he only had to occasionally consult with the engineers about the station's equipment. There was a large couch in the middle of his quarters, where Julian spent most of his time - sitting in the holonet, watching local Coruscant broadcasts, or flying to Coruscant for pleasure.
Four months of construction had already been underway and was nearing completion.
* * *
Anakin Skywalker, Koros.
* * *
I had to get busy as soon as I got home. Specifically, myself. The Force has kept my skills and physical fitness up to par. Any Jedi needs training to increase skills and physical strength, not to keep it at the same level. In the morning, after flying home, I took a four hour nap and ran to find Shiai. Finding him downstairs in the dining room, I greeted my son:
- Good morning, Shiai. How is life young?
- Dad," he wanted to stand up, but I held him in place:
- Don't get distracted. So, how's life? What have you learnt?
- Oh, a lot! - I'm already training in the woods. Nyner takes me hunting.
- That's right," I nodded, "What are you hunting?
- There are small animals here," Shiai showed me what kind of animals they were. About the size of a cat, I see.
- Can you shoot them?
- Of course," Shiai nodded, immediately blaming me, "You're always gone and gone....
- I'm sorry," I sighed, "I'll try to be with you more often. It's a difficult task to create an empire from scratch. And also to ensure the future of the empire... Well, today we'll do swordsmanship.
- Yay! - Shiai jumped up after leaving his breakfast uneaten. All right, I'll show you how to be malnourished!
As far as I remember, he's already learnt the first form, so we can move on....
Exercise with my son is a necessary and compulsory thing. Well, at least I could give him a couple of hours a day, and at the same time I could train myself.
As much as I wanted to do nanodroids, I had to go to the dueling chamber.
* * *
Two days later.
* * *
I was holding a crystal. A small artificial crystal, about the size of an energy cell, glistened slightly with smooth edges. A large number of nanodroids required powerful control droids with carefully written programmes, so it was not possible to use them.
Inside the crystal were two billion two hundred million nanodroids, tightly assembled into a single structure. The cost of such a crystal was an order of magnitude more than a koruska of the same size, and a koruska... one such koruska crystal was worth as much as several star destroyers, or as much as building a large city. The nanorobots were not only created, but tested. Although the very creation of a nanodroid by force was a huge test of my abilities and a great training - to manipulate such small and precise mechanisms by force I had to enter meditation and use all my abilities to the fullest. By God, it's easier to create a death star from scratch than a nanodroid - there's a lot of tedious work to be done in the macro world.
After creating the first nanodroid, I copied its structure - wrote two billion structures into a memory crystal, aka pseudoholocron, and left the duplicator to create nanodroids. In that role, he was the perfect tool. After creating the nanodroids, I took them out and connected them to Erdva's processor and tested them. Erdva also had to connect to the powerful central processor of the yacht.
The first droids obediently flew and performed simple tasks - for example, to destroy certain molecules with the help of their microlasers, as well as rearrange particles of matter from place to place, joining them at the nanoscale. It appeared that the strength of such created material was not inferior to the original one. Or even surpassed it, as there were no microcracks and other defects, monolith.
Tests showed that monomatter was seventy-five and a half percent stronger than its counterpart. That's in terms of resistance to physical damage, before destruction. I've taken up residence in the lab, finding myself a new toy in the form of nanorobots. Erdva didn't comment on that.
- Erdva, wait," I stopped the droid watching my experiments.
- I am. What did you want?
- To test something. How many nanodroids can use your computational core?
- Two hundred and fifty million. Depends on the number of application clusters.
I see, so we can expand our abilities in that area. By the way, I divided the management of droids into tasks - assembly required monotonous work from many droids. I called each such task an application cluster - a process involving about a thousand droids. Since no unique actions were required, all droids could be used by a single process. The most obvious example is a galley, with rowing slaves. There are many of them, but they perform the same task - rowing, doing it synchronously and mindlessly. It is the same in the army - there are a lot of soldiers and there is no sense to manage each one separately, their task is unified and synchronised, so the formation is managed by one sergeant who gives simple commands. The same "army way" was used in controlling nanodroids - a thousand droids in a single formation fly out of the capsule, rush to the object at high speed, each one takes a grain of several molecules and breaks it off from a common piece of matter, carrying it to a couple of millimetres and there already assembling a new figure from them, and all this under the command of a "sergeant" - the process in the computer. However, there is a difference - the cluster not only monitors the performance of work, but also analyses information, and can take control over each individual and for the group, forming a list of tasks for all. This is already comparable to the work of a sergeant not on the platz, but in the barracks - Private Ivanov is going to peel potatoes, Petrov - to clean a point, and Sidorov - will wash uniforms for grandfathers.
I came up with better control schemes than have been in use so far, although my merit in this is little - nanodroids are simply few and no one has ever thought about optimising the management of such large colonies.
While I was thinking, a duplicator or two jingled, and I ran over to it. There, on the counter, was a second crystal just like it. Too bad, putting them on the market would cause a sea of problems. However, no one forbade me from using them. The nature of working with the substance also had to be invented by myself. There were no ready-made solutions, so I spent half a day thinking up a way to simplify the assembly and disassembly of the material object by droids. And the solution was found through experimentation. The nanodroid used its manipulators to grab a piece of matter. In the example of Frick, he tore off a piece of metal from the general structure of the metal, acting on it with his laser. When heated, the bond of molecules weakened and the manipulators easily tore off a piece of matter, and then it was only necessary to apply it to the necessary place of the assembled object - when approaching the bond of molecules acted and the piece stood in its place.
Two billion droids worked for about thirty seconds assembling a simple cube of metal. But that wasn't enough for me - I asked Erdv to work on building something more valuable, like a processor. After half an hour of thought, the droids produced what I wanted-a small black crystal the size of a matchbox. The processor had been successfully synthesised from the raw materials the nanodroids had used to dismantle a piece of datapad. The datapad looked funny - not a trace of cut or broken off - only half of it was gone.
- Interesting... - I thought, - if you as a tool to give nanodroids? А?
- It is interesting, - confirmed Erdva, - but they can not be used in repair in airless space. Nanodroids don't have space engines.
- Yes, it's a pity," I nodded, "but still, with such a tool you can repair everything, literally put the damage back together molecule by molecule... let's work on it..." I went into the creation of another tool for Erdva. Two hours later, the droid inside the hull had a crystal with nanomachines capable of repairing anything as good as my power forging.
- Just be careful," I warned him, "don't use those bots against living things. They're too dangerous, and if anything... it'll cause us gigantic problems.
- Okay," Erdva agreed, "use them only on inanimate material objects. Accepted.
But what I did was only the first part of the plan to use nanotechnology. The first, the most important. I had a working sample of a colony of droids capable of assembling physical objects, so I briefly thought about how I could make it work. Or rather - what could be simplified. Theoretically, I can even assemble a death star with the help of nanodroids, but I don't have people and I don't intend to waste human resources, which are minimal, on one big gun. But the fact is...
Two more days I had to spend on experiments, only sometimes studying with Shiai or watching the construction. The droids, by the way, had cleared a part of the city and had already started building - the city was being built in blocks. They wanted to build a palace as the first building, but I killed the idea at the root - it will be impossible to move there anyway, as the noise at the construction site is terrible, so it's better to leave space with a reserve, and we'll always have time to build.