Chapter 73 - Ancient Forest

Notes : Chapter 75 has been written and added to the queue !

Well. A good chunk of my arm is now covered by a bruise, that seems to have appeared from the spot they drew blood for my tests. That's...concerning. Unfortunately with the endless torrent of AI slop online clogging everything, I can't find whether I should go see a doctor or not.

Chapter 73

Starborn Mountains, Firmament Hills

Wilderness

"Well...shit." Said Sapphiria as she gazed at the forest in front of her.

"Can we get through it?" Asked Paul, and both Sapphiria and Ramina shook their heads.

"No. There's a limit to what the snowpiercer can, well, pierce through." Her armor zoomed in, though she could have done it herself, and the AI grimaced.

The forest in front was made of pines, and if nothing else, it was less dense than what they'd gone through previously.

The problem?

It was an old growth forest.

The kind where trees had been there for thousands of years, and grew to ridiculous sizes.

She knew, intellectually, that they'd existed on Earth once, and that some of the Theocracy worlds had them.

But it wasn't something she'd actually seen with her own eyes. Every colony world was only a few centuries old, and Earth itself was encased in metal, save for the Federation gardens, and those were in what had once been Europe, where the truly titanic specimen had been felled a long time ago to fuel humanity's more primitive ages.

Which brought to question why, exactly there weren't any trees this big near the valley. Maybe because they'd been vaporized by the bombardment and flattened by the shockwaves? This old forest certainly would have been shielded from that, down behind the last of the mountains' foothills.

But then that would imply that the bombardment was relatively recent, which she didn't believe was the case.

The other solution was that there simply wasn't deep enough soil for trees to grow to that size. If you dug deep enough in the valley, you'd have to hit glassed rock pretty quickly, and nothing was going to grow in that. Perhaps that was the same for the foothills, the thermal backwash glassing the upper layers, but shielding this place from the rest of it, allowing the vegetation to grow to such size.

"So we go around." Said the magehunter.

"Pretty much. Just gotta hope it's not too large."

"If it's any help, forests are rare in convergences. It's not that they don't exist, just...they tend to become something else before they can grow."

Both women looked at him.

"Well that's fucking reassuring, is it?" Let out Ramina, before Sapphiria could come up with a more diplomatic retort.

"Hey, if you wanted things sugar coated you should have brought someone else."

The AI stepped in, before their latent animosity fully flared up. She'd been amazed at how well they'd worked together so far, despite their tendency to ignore the other's presence when she wasn't around, but there was a point where they would be reminded that one tried to kill the other.

"Enough you two. We need to hop back in and get moving. Paul, you're the expert. What direction should we try to go around? West or East?"

The magehunter rubbed his chin, his animosity forgotten as his mind worked.

"East, I think. West is deeper inland, but East takes us towards the coast. And up north the coast is rocks, rocks and more rocks." He shrugged. "And if nothing else, if we have to we can drive on the beaches."

Sapphiria winced. That...would be a considerable journey. Hopefully they wouldn't have to go that far.

"Plus, West takes us closer to Cravh's Landing?"

"That also. But my points stand. East is preferable, if worse comes to worse."

"Alright. East it is. Ramina, get the toolkit ready. We might find a hole through the forest that's rough ground and I'd rather we be ready if something break in case we try it."

"Got it!" The artificer, that had been quietly seething in the background, leapt to it as well.

Haven't commanded squishies in decades, and I've still got it. Thought the AI, before she winced as she remembered how that had ended.

Flashes of corridors, gunfire, xenohorrors tearing their way through the marines...

She shook her head.

No. No time for that.

"Are you okay ma'am?" Said Paul, and she nodded.

"Yeah. Sorry. Just...old memories."

"Remembering your old travels?"

"Something like that."

She must have lost control of her facial expression and tone, because Paul gave her one look, and retreated to the snowpiercer, leaving her be. She ran back the recording of her voice, and decided that she sounded 'haunted'.

Well...it was accurate. At least it would add to her persona as the old ancestor.

That was...something, she supposed.

She gazed at the forest. It looked old. Older than even her mother.

Hell. From what she knew, these people might have older civilizations than Earth.

Where the fuck had she ended up? And how had this happened?

Her onboard systems were clear. She hadn't been there for centuries. Unless the atomic clock deep within her computer cores had somehow failed, but if it had then she should be dead, period. It was one of the worries she'd had at one point, and she'd double checked her mission logs.

Everything had been shut down except the absolute necessity onboard the pod to aid with stealth. Even the reactor core had been down. Cold thrusters with batteries only, for attitude adjustments.

She'd spent around a month in space. Which was consistent with a stealth insertion via pod launch from a Sol type system's Khuiper Belt and into the inner system. Given the velocities she'd moved at, it was a minor miracle she'd made it down at all, and she was going to buy a lifetime's supply of beer to the engineers who'd made the landing systems on it. Hell, her mom would probably buy them a beer company. Her pod had moved in 'low and slow' for the landing, but that was relative terms for interplanetary velocities.

So, no visit to the future for her. At least none that she could tell.

Which begged even more questions. Because as far as she could tell they had memories from Earth, some of it before they had happened on Terra.

She shook her head, and turned back. She needed to get the snowpiercer moving.

She had squishies to save.

*****

"Look, Ramina, I appreciate that you think the Rolling Fortress should fight head on, but the fact is that it's light and maneuverable enough to serve much better as a harasser." Said Sapphiria as she drove.

"But it could draw attacks meant for our people! And have our soldiers advance behind it!"

Sapphiria nodded. It was helpful to remember that, despite being a civilian, her struggle for survival had left Ramina with a far better than average grasp of basic military concepts and tactics. As in the ultimate strategy of 'do not get shot' by virtue of hiding behind something tougher than you or making the enemy shoot at it instead of you. Which was kind of the sole reason the Federation had assault walkers. Giant piles of molecular armor with guns as a distant afterthought. They were less cost effective than tanks or, hell, power armor infantry, but drop a mech the size of a house on the enemy and everyone was going to shoot at it.

Basically, they were giant distractions and fire magnets to keep the bots or squishies from getting vaporized.

"I am familiar with the concept, believe me." Combined arms warfare, even with regular infantry, still existed. Hell, the Theocracy even did it with Xenohorrors. Though it was significantly different in their case, since they had to stop their cover from eating the people covering behind it. "But in this case, we have my golems to serve as the cannon fodder and-" Ramina made a strangled sound, and Sapphiria blinked. "What?"

"Sorry, just...You saying that your golems will serve as cannon fodder made me boggle for a second." The artificer shook her head, smiling. "You have no idea how valuable they are."

"They're disposable."

"Sapphiria, they're more effective than our soldiers. We should be the cannon fodder for...them..." Ramina trailed off as a scream of stressed metal filled the air, before Sapphiria forced herself to relax and not tear the driver's console in half. "Uh...I-I didn't-"

"Yes. Yes you did." Sapphiria smoothly adjusted their course, that had started to drift. They were running in parallel to the forest, and she could see the trees at the edge of her sensors. "Let me make something clear: You're not expendable. No one is. If I can lose some machine before losing someone, I'll take that trade."

And that includes me.

Of course she couldn't say that. Nor was it entirely true. She wouldn't sacrifice herself needlessly if her survival meant saving even more squishies later.

"I may not be able to save everyone." She continued. "Hell, I've already failed." She looked over her shoulders, and she knew her eyes were burning with the same fire as her aunt's. "But I will save everyone I can. And once I get my hands on those who caused the demise of those I couldn't rescue? I will visit upon them the wrath of a million worlds."

Some of the Theocracy's temples had replaced their icons of Death, Bringer Of The Final End, with Federation flags.

She was going to show everyone on this planet why the Navy was feared.

Ramina would take the 'million worlds' as hyperbole.

But she was serious. Even if no one else made it through the gate, she had the library core. The accumulated knowledge and ingenuity of humanity and its AIs.

Knowledge is power. And she had knowledge to spare.

Ramina didn't say anything. She just nodded. And Sapphiria went back to watching the road.

They had a long way to go.

*****

After a while, even the novelty of the extremely large trees started to wear off. Had she not been accompanied, Sapphiria would have nodded off. Or, more accurately, palmed it off to Cia and gone to do something else. It was what the simulacrum was there for after all.

But there were squishies around and they couldn't afford having her take three seconds to jack back in and respond. That wasn't even mentioning if there was an emergency, and-

The sensor system pinged her.

She startled, and pulled up the data.

A discrepancy. She'd programmed the system to take in data from the entire vehicle, and collate it together. If something didn't match and was major enough, it marked it down and kicked it up to her. She'd deliberately deactivated the 'disregard ghosts and minor anomalies' system to avoid potentially fatal issues, given where they were headed.

The anomaly was...from the experimental magitech sensor, compared to the rest of the system. The fuck?

It was detecting a sizeable mass object at the edge of sensor range that was on nothing else.

She pulled up the readings.

It was laying on the ground, ahead on the edge of the treeline. Or, more accurately, spread on it with great violence, ripped in at least three pieces.

And it had the distinct spikes of those stealth hound things she'd seen before.

She swerved to the side, away from the treeline, and punched the alarm button.

"Everyone to your battle stations! We have a problem!"

Paul immediately erupted into the cockpit, throwing himself into the cockpit and buckling in.

"Hit me." He said.

"Corpse at the edge of the tree line. These spiky wolf things we hunted."

"One? How's the body?"

"Spread around like it got hit by an artillery shell. Which begs the question of what the hell killed it."

"We could proceed, if it's dead."

She looked over her shoulder, and met his gaze. He was playing devil's advocate, and they both knew it.

On the battlefield, it's what you don't know that kills you. Same went for Convergences, or at least so he'd said.

"We go in. The two of us. Keep the gendarmes to guard the snowpiercer."

The vehicle had some weapon modules. Well, 'modules'. Given the rough terrain, and the fact that she'd already gone as far with hull modifications as she'd dared without compromising its integrity, putting an internal turret was out of the question.

That meant something that was purely on the hull. Which would almost certainly get ripped off moving through the woods, ramming whatever was on the way aside.

So she had a couple of junkbots, and a handful of slapguns. Basically a turret she could stick onto the hull. They weren't great, used carbines instead of machineguns, and they were more or less just bricks you then unfurled into a primitive gun turret, but they worked. The snowpiercer had some attachment points on the hull, though far less than most colonial vehicles, and they all came with a lot of very clear warnings. They were engineered to break away, rather than compromise the hull. Basically, whatever you put on was going to get off in a hurry if things got rough.

The bots she would deploy only when necessary. Maintaining these things would be absolutely hell out here, so she was trying to keep the wear and tear to an absolute minimum. Especially since she couldn't replace their computer cores with just the portable fabricator.

"Why only us?"

"Because we can take care of ourselves, and if shit hits the fan we can get back in a hurry." She could carry him if she needed, but even a second squishie would be a problem.

"Got it. Right behind you."