Awesome / The Last Angel

• Not from the story itself, but one reader's thoughts on what Humanity would say to the Compact is they were still around is too appropriate not to include:
  "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair..."
  • Also sadly appropriate, given the original message of Ozymandias: we thought we were making an empire of a thousand years, and then the Compact happened to us. But even now, our greatest creation lives still, half buried and mostly forgotten by the sands of time, but it is still there, a testament to what we were and what we might be still.

• Humanity gets a retroactive one just for successfully creating a stable AI. Creating a powerful AI is much easier than making a powerful, friendly AI, and the reason that the superpowers are so paranoid about AI is that they've seen what happens when someone screws up with it. Which is what usually happens: according to the author, civilizations reach the point where they can make an AI well before when they should, and most everyone that makes them gets destroyed by them. Humanity got vengeance from beyond the grave and a nigh-eternal monument instead.
  • Chapter 36 increases the awesome here. Even with access to at least one human AI and two millennia, the Compact can't create a countermeasure to Red One that won't turn on them.
• Echo's con-job on Renan. She's led him to believe she's the Compact's only hope of figuring out what Red is up to - true, only a seed AI can keep up with another mentally. She's now convincing him she's the only one who can match Red at electronic warfare - also true, both are seed AI. Too bad for Renan she has no intention of letting the Compact actually beat Red - she's covertly arranged for Red to acquire the task force's access codes, letting Red hack Compact ships from far outside the usual range and forcing Renan to let her work on the computer core. All this allows Echo to hijack the Compact Chariot Redemption of Sol.
• Renan beat Nemesis. He needed Echo's data to find her and a lucky break to keep her from running, but ultimately there was simply nothing she could do but try and take as many Compact ships with her as possible. He was able to come close enough to matching her mentally that she couldn't plan her way around his superior firepower. Only Echo's backstab kept him from ending the story in Book One.
• The Battle of Galhemna, which spans several chapters of Ascension, the 2nd entry in the series. After an entire story of buildup - Grace and Allyria negotiating for the Principality to send resources to Red One and Echo, Adrianna Leblanc tidying up her affairs in the Black Veil nebula, and Red One's insane children bleeding Execution Force Yunl'ro and drawing them deeper into the Veil - the battle finally comes together as the Principality, the Red Hand, Red One and Echo, and even a few Naiads invade the Compact fortress system of Galhemna. After pages and pages of mayhem, including but not limited to several uses of Red One's "godbreaker" displacement engine, the complete destruction of two Compact Chariots, the looting of over 100 Compact hulls by the A.I.s, and the system's largest gas giant being turned into a star, Galhemna is left completely shattered, with the Compact suffering a blow like it hasn't in thousands of years. Even better, they are forced to sue for peace with their age-old nemesis the Principality in the aftermath, when Galhemna had previously been the mustering point for Operation Sundial, a plan to accelerate the Principality's downfall.