Chapter 74 - Anomaly

Note :

My arm hurts like hell. It's not too bad if I don't move it or poke it too much, but there's this constant, lancing pain throughout the bruise. At least it's not spreading anymore.

Chapter 74

Far North of Kauvis, Terminus Wildlands

Wilderness

"Bloody." Said Paul as he knelt by the body.

"Very." Sapphiria took a position by his side, sweeping the treeline with her plasma gun. It was starting to snow. Or rather, half rain, half snow, as the temperature had gone up a bit. Which was just...great. Muddy snow for everyone! "Got torn apart. Can't tell by what. My sen-divination isn't working so well."

"Which means it's fresh. These things fade once they die." He touched the corpse, which felt foolhardy, but given how hazy the body was still, with its dying camouflage, was probably the only way to get any real data. "Claws, I think. And jaws. It got raked as it was trying to get into the cover of trees, then pinned and something bit down the middle, ripping it straight out and spitting it back out, separating it into three parts."

Sapphiria winced.

"In a single bite?" It wasn't the biggest of those things they'd encountered, but it was still the size of one of Earth's pre-bioengineering wolves. Not fully lion sized like the others, but still.

"Probably." He leaned forward. "I'm not familiar with the monsters here, but maybe one of the bear things you fought?"

The AI nodded.

"Right, yeah." She looked around. "The one we encountered certainly seemed to be able to see through their stealth."

The experimental sensor, made from the condensate Ramina had harvested from its corpse was how she'd found this body after all.

"Well, it must be hunting these guys. Probably was pursuing the group that attacked you, stalking them at a distance, then closing in for the kill while they were distracted."

"Great." She looked at the carcass. It had been savaged, but not devoured. "Do these monsters just exist solely to kill?"

Paul grimaced.

"That, is a question for an archmage. All I can tell you is that it sure seems to be their primary occupation." He tapped the head. "One thing's for sure, these ones move in packs. I'm guessing the others fled into the forest, and the bear followed."

"Then let's get the hell out of there before it returns."

"Agreed."

*****

It was a somewhat more grim trip from now on. They knew, of course, that they were almost certain to encounter monsters on the way. But despite the snowpiercer being an extremely formidable defense, with its hull plating and remarkable speed even in rough terrain, it wasn't by any means perfect. And something that could bite a full size wolf, or a person, in half was perhaps a bit beyond its capacities.

Especially as the snowpiercer was built to survive environmental hazards. One of the reasons she'd insisted on going forward was that her android and armor were self repairing, and she'd proven she could take these things on, especially now that she had her shoulder mounted machineguns.

Without being burdened by too many squishies to cover, she could also use the armor's enhanced mobility to considerable effect. A normal suit of marine armor would have gotten run down pretty quickly. Her force recon suit...

Well, she could already sprint so fast it wasn't that much slower than taking her minecarts. But she could also do the kind of leaps power armor was famous for in more open terrain. She hadn't demonstrated the capability to the squishies...in part because she hadn't actually known how to properly do it and didn't want to embarrass herself. Going up, she knew how to do. Getting back down without ending up in the dirt however...

Thankfully, the armor had a few training programs. Including one tailor made for naval personnel, that she suspected either her family or naval command had put in there.

In short, it treated you like an idiot being dragged along a real squad of force recon troopers for whatever expertise they desperately needed. Generally, calling down heavy fire from up high without killing everyone. Marines were trained in calling down orbital bombardment, but no one trusted them to call in fire missions from capital ships, because if you messed those up you tended to put a sizeable dent in the planet's biosphere or completely collapsed it. Queue Maligor Five where something like that had happened and forced the whole colony to be evacuated as the planet rapidly became uninhabitable, causing half a dozen court martials.

Not because only half a dozen people had been responsible, but because they were the only survivors with some responsibility that the navy got.

Her aunt had actually done that once upon a time, being dragged around by a platoon on Alpha Centauri, back when she was an ensign with stars in her eyes and not nameless horrors and unquenchable fire.

In any case, the program had proven highly helpful. It had a fair few links to naval training and even brought up some low to zero gravity maneuvers.

'Fear me, for I have passed the tutorial' and all that.

Also she had some of the best power armor the Federation had ever built and an energy weapon built to blow up battle tanks. That helped.

She received a ping from Cia, and accepted it, muting her avatar.

"Status?"

"Ma'am. The mining drones have reached an...anomaly." The simulacrum hesitated. "You need to see this."

The AI sighed. It was always something.

"I'll be there as soon as I can."

*****

As soon as she could turned out to be some five hours later, after taking a shower, which was luxurious, despite the tight quarters. Fortunately the vehicle had individual instead of common showers, otherwise many shenanigans would probably have happened with Ramina failing to withhold a comment. But yeah it had been great. Cia was right, she needed to do some recreational things to keep herself grounded She should build a shower at home...

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

For once she didn't curse it out.

Then she'd had to use the lavatory, which was embarrassing and useless, since she just sat on it for a few minutes, and then finally put all the squishies that weren't on guard duty to sleep and hopped out.

"Alright." She said as she popped into the simulation. "Tell me about that anomaly."

"Right away ma'am." Said the simulacrum, standing up from the sofa, and...was that cake on the table? She looked back at it and it was gone. Cia cleared her throat and the AI refocused on her. "The anomaly appears to be some kind of blast door."

The AI blinked.

"What?" She shook her head. "What do you mean 'appears to be'?"

A blast door was a blast door. A giant slab of metal. It made sense there'd be one on their path, digging their way through the collapsed entrance tunnel, they'd even planned for it. It was hard to mistake for anything else.

The simulacrum positively squirmed, which was downright bizarre.

"It is beyond my experience and knowledge base."

Oh. Right. Simulacrum. She was incapable of creative thinking. She was intelligent, but she wasn't sapient.

If she encountered something she didn't know, protocol was to call up on her AI.

"Of course. Show me."

The simulacrum gestured, and a hologram, as well as various streams of data, appeared in the air.

"That's..." The AI froze. "What the fuck."

To give Cia credit, she had, in the time she'd had to wait for Sapphiria to come home, shipped the survey sensors down the hole and a cable to keep them powered up, and tried to get a full look at it.

And that full look had instantly triggered her memories. Hopping in the low gravity under the gigantic slab of metal, the voice of her aunt and Ciel bickering while Arcadia tried to separate them, before giving up as Stellyra, Airah's...girlfriend? Bonded AI? She was never sure. As Stellyra just threw more logs into the fire with some well placed quips, prickling the pride of each veteran in turn.

"Indeed. It-"

"That's a UIS blast door!"

The simulacrum blinked.

"What?"

For once, the simulacrum sounded like she had a full on emotion, and the AI met her confused gaze.

"It's a UIS blast door!" She stepped forward, manipulating the data. "Exact same dimensions. And more or less the same composition. The chamber, what's left of it anyway, seemed to have followed the standard template as well."

"There was a standard template?"

"The UIS standardized everything. A lot of their stuff forms the basis of what is the colonial database. Their lunar domes are the grandfathers of our colony domes." The United Interstellar States didn't have Arcadia on their side, so they didn't have the best hyperdrives or fusion reactor technology. But they had industry and some very, very good engineers. Even her aunt admitted that. It was why they'd almost won the war in Alpha Centauri and their Navy ended up one of the greatest contributors in the fight against Arcadia. Her mom always said that UISN dreadnoughts had been the bane of her existence. These ships just refused to die. "They standardized their blast doors and used them everywhere. One was at the entrance of the lunar domes. The ones they kept as a museum. They had them on their colonies, they had them in their outposts." She pulled up a few files, taking a step back as they popped into the simulation. "And they had them in their Planetary Defense Centers."

The schematics didn't correspond to the place they were in. The first thing she'd done after discovering what she was in had been to search all the ones in the library. The half built one she'd crashed into certainly followed the general philosophy, but not exact construction templates.

Which begged the question as to why it used a standardized blast door but not a PDC's schematics.

"But...that..." The simulacrum glitched, briefly. "Ma'am, this place is old. If the colonists' words about how long ago the mining expedition was, then these tunnels are probably older than the invention of the hyperdrive."

"Yeah. I noticed that. Among other things. Chronologically, nothing here makes sense. Unless..."

"Unless?"

Sapphiria grimaced.

"Mom did some research on temporal manipulation. Way back when."

"Time travel is impossible."

"I am well aware of that." You couldn't break causality. That much appeared to be absolute. Otherwise, in purely relative space, going FTL should have put you in the past. "But time is relative. Mom was looking at ways of speeding it up or slowing it down. Even stop it altogether, with some kind of stasis field."

She was pulling up various old files, and the simulacrum looked up at them, though in truth she was probably just processing the data directly without the simulation as an interface.

"Most of these are highly conjectural."

"So's artificial gravity, and they seem to have it here. But if you have a better explanation than, say, this whole place being in some kind of accelerated time bubble, making every year that passes here take mere weeks on Earth, I am all ears."

"...I do not."

Sapphiria nodded.

"Then from now on, it must be our operating assumption." She grimaced. "If nothing else, it should give us more time before the Navy stumbles upon us. Like, a lot more time."

"And if we're wrong?"

"I'll still keep the original timeline in mind. For the fleet arriving here." Sapphiria sighed. "But...let's be real. Given our current progress, we're not going to be able to blow that fortress out of the skies in our pessimistic timeframes."

In fact, she was starting to fear she may not be able to destroy it in any of their estimated time frames. At least not with just her tech.

But with magic...

Maybe.

"...Understood." The simulacrum looked at the original hologram with the sensor recordings of the door. "In any case, what shall we do?"

"Dig around it. Maybe slice it a bit and bring it back."

"For analysis? An excellent choice."

The AI chuckled.

"I was thinking more of having refined metals available for recycling."

The simulacrum tilted her head.

"I was talking about the writing."

"I'm sorry?"

The simulacrum gestured, and bits of the sensor take popped up.

There were...engravings throughout the entire structure of the door.

Sapphiria took a step back.

"What the fuck."