[MFR] Chapter 66 - Big Guns

Notes :

Apologies for the lack of uploads. Unfortunately, I'm currently trudging through the edits for MFR book 1 and it is...HORRENDOUS. Just pages upon pages of edits that just fry my brain. Since I have ADHD and the French government position on it is that it does not exist for adult, magically vanishes at 18 years of age and anyone saying otherwise is delusional, I'm entirely untreated. So it's hell. I'd genuinely rather shoot myself than go through any more of this.

But deadlines are looming and my publisher is getting antsy. Fuck my life.

Chapter 66

Starborn Mountains, Mount Nebula

Mining Hub

"Oh...This is beautiful."

Sapphiria watched with open concern as Ramina fell to her knees, and draped herself across the autocannon.

Please tell me I wasn't like that. Sent the AI to Cia.

Perhaps about seventy-five percent of her intensity. The artificer started stroking the weapon, and the AI could feel the simulacrum wince. Fifty.

"Ahem." The AI cleared her throat, and frowned as the artificer barely reacted. "Careful, Malry might get jealous if she saw you doing that."

"Oh shush, I'd just tie her up to it. The perfect package." She met Sapphiria's eyes, and it seemed to finally penetrate just who she was talking to and what she was saying. The artificer's face became beet red, reaching all the way to her ears, and she bolted to her feet. "I-I mean, sorry ! I just got...excited."

"I can see that." Better not mention the fact that her sensors could get into extreme detail about how excited she was. Though some of those elevated vital signs may be due to her embarassment. Regardless, squishies rarely liked it when you pointed out you could read their heart rate. "I see you like heavy firepower."

"Who doesn't ?"

"Fair enough."

"Do I get to fire it ?"

Sapphiria shook her head.

"No. Absolutely not."

"You fired it ! Don't deny it, it's still warm !"

"Yes I did. Because I knew how to handle it."

"But-"

"Do you know how to mount it ? Feed it ammunition ? Aim it ? Any procedures if it malfunctions ? Do you even have the strength to control it ? Tripods can do a lot but they're not magic. They can't fully cancel recoil and they won't remove mass either."

The artificer closed her mouth.

"...Fine."

"Good girl."

"Gah ! Don't call me that."

The AI smiled.

"Alright, sorry. I can test fire it for you though. Then, you can help me figure out how to get it mounted on a turret and how we should set it up topside."

*****

"May I ask you a question ?"

Sapphiria looked up from the turret mount she had been adjusting. Unlike the machineguns, robotic arms wouldn't work at all for this. It was going to have to be much more limited, and sturdy, to be able to eat up the recoil of the autocannon.

The artificer was looking straight at her, fiddling with a wrench.

"Sure. Go ahead Ramina."

"Why do you use firearms ? I mean, you have way better weapons. I've seen you use them. Why firearms then ?"

"My batteries can't make enough energy to sustain energy weapons. Only my armor can. And even then they're expensive. Firearms I can make easily, cheaply, and feed equally easily and cheaply."

The artificer slowly nodded.

"So, when did you come up with them ? The guns, I mean. I know they've been around forever in Vestiges, but we haven't really cracked how to make the full versions until a couple of decades ago."

Sapphiria stopped. Vestiges ? Ruins.

Like the Planetary Defence Center she'd crashed into. So they were fully aware there had been a civilization here before them.

"...If we start talking about my life, we're going to be there a while."

She didn't particularly try to sound casual, and Ramina nodded, taking the hint.

"Of course, my apologies."

Sometimes there were advantages to being seen as a profoundly antisocial, cranky hermit.

...Gods, was that what she'd been back in the Federation as well ? There was a reason the Navy sent her solo. Sure, she was one of Arcadia's descendents, she could control entire fleets if necessary. But generally you didn't send out a whole carrier groups with just an AI and a Cia. At the very least you gave a second AI to handle some of the cruisers in case you needed to do some scouting. Lightspeed was a harsh, harsh mistress, even on her meson communications.

That...wasn't a particularly comfortable line of thought, and she refocused on the turret.

"It should handle the stress." She said, not so subtly changing the subject. "And put some serious hurt downrange. A long way away too. They know where Astralis is, right ? The Bane."

"If they didn't they wouldn't have sent their troops on the road to attack it."

Sapphiria nodded.

"Then we can mount them up on gun towers. Not necessarily very tall ones, but enough to clear their lines of fire and enable..." She checked the simulations and quickly adjusted them. "Four ? Five ? To cover the whole of Astralis."

Technically, she could do it with three, but that wouldn't leave a lot of redundancy. Also there'd be too many blindspots if something got inside the perimeter.

Sadly, given the abilities the monsters had shown so far, she had to plan for some of them getting through the net, no matter how tightly she wove it. The Federation had grown adept at protecting squishies, but the colonial package wasn't made to deal with stealthed hostile, enemy jamming or active camouflage. If you were up against that, it was the Navy's job to take care of it for you.

Well...she was the Navy here. Hurray.

"The turrets can depress their guns, but I don't think they can shoot underneath them." Said Ramina.

"That's why we need that many. They can shoot what's underneath the others."

"Fair enough."

Sapphiria checked her internal clock. She had to adjust it from Terran time to local time, which appeared to be approximately six hours earlier.

"We're getting close to sundown. Ready to return up ?"

"Sure. Tomorrow we start on the hull, right ?"

"Oh yeah." Her bots were set to finish the tunnel at around midnight, the rest of the night would be spent hauling the first few pieces up. "Big time. hope you're ready for some heavy lifting !"

"Well, it's why we made the cranes, no ?"

"Exactly !" Technically it could be assembled by hand, for some reason, but it would take a lot of squishies and some impressive coordination to pull it off. Thankfully, she had alternatives. "We should make short work of it !"

*****

Of course, things were never that easy.

"What happened ?" Asked Sapphiria as she knelt by the minecart.

"The cart was able to handle the load." Said Cia, her projection pacing around the derailed machine and its fallen piece of hull. "The rails...less so."

Sapphiria grimaced.

"I'd more or less assumed their rails would be as sturdy as their mineshaft support beams. That's on me." Evidently they weren't. That, or time had a much greater effect on them which was...possible. "Any solutions ?"

"Less speed will help. I also recommend adding some way to lighten the load on any one section of rails."

"We can make some longer carts. With some weight distribution systems it'll work." They'd been reaching for the absolutely cheapest, smallest carts they could get away with for their purpose. Clearly that wouldn't be enough. "I'll get some from the database. Make new ones if none fit. You get those rails replaced and change the transport schedule. Smallest possible pieces on the carts we have, larger only on the new ones. Got it ?"

"Aye aye."

Uh. An old school navy response. Maybe Cia was developing a personality and she wasn't just hallucinating.

"Good. Let's hope it won't affect the assembly overmuch."

*****

Sapphiria raised an eyebrow as she saw the face of the militiaman covering the tunnel entrance. More of a formality now that it was entombed in a bunker but still.

"Are you okay ? You look, uh..."

"Like I haven't slept a wink ?" He blinked, slowly. "I haven't. I mean no offense milady...ma'am, but we might need some sleeping quarters. Like, a separate room from this. With something to stop the noise."

"Stop the- oh."

Right. Building the bunker had turned their entire little outpost into a giant echo chamber. Meaning every minecart hurtling by made one hell of a racket, and they came and went throughout the night.

"I'll handle that ASAP." She said, dumping a summary of the situation Cia as she went for the main doors, stepping out into the morning light.

The rails lead all the way to the workshop now, and she could have just gone straight there in a cart, but the way she rode them was...less than dignified, to say the least, and they still somewhat terrified her, so for the last stretch of the journey she preferred to walk. Or run.

Ramina was there waiting for her, bundled in...a coat and an ushenka jammed on her head.

The AI came to a halt in front of the artificer.

"Malry ?" She asked, gesturing at the outfit.

The young woman sighed, and nodded.

"Malry."

Well, she may clearly be on top in their relationship, but one couldn't prevent your wife from bundling you up when it got cold. Speaking of, she checked her temperature sensors and yikes.

Okay, she'd been wondering why the militia hadn't just slept outside the bunker. They'd been used to sleeping al fresco after all.

Yeah. Given the readouts, no kidding they'd preferred the minecarts to the cold.

It was a wonder not everything was frozen solid. It would most likely snow again soon though.

"Everyone got a roof over their head ?"

"Thanks to you, yeah. And they can heat themselves." She shrugged. "I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's something. Oh ! By the way, you'll be happy to know they've started using your heaters for cooking too ! See they found out that...uh..."

Sapphiria tried to get her expression back under control. Cooking. They were cooking their food on stripped down RTGs. The literal box of stuff so fucking radioactive it became hot.

"I...would advise finding another source of heat for meal preparation." She said diplomatically. "It is, er...perhaps not the safest nor wisest course of action to tamper with my batteries."

To say the fucking least. Note to self : secure the hell out of the fission plants when she built them, so that the squishies didn't take a dip in the coolant pool or something.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

A logic probe. She was going to make a logic probe to hunt down that program.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Had someone monitored her thought patterns the only thing they could have gotten was something close to 'incoherent screams of rage'.

"Of course. My apologies." Ramina stepped aside as a minecart trundled past, holding a hull section. "These are...smaller than I anticipated."

"I had a problem with transport. Smaller pieces first, until I've fully worked it out." Or, more accurately, finished manufacturing her new and improved carts (TM).

"Right. Time to get to work then ?"

"Yep. Let's give this baby form !"

*****

Someday, when someone inevitably made a movie out of this, they'd probably make an epic montage of them welding hull sections together and doing all sorts of technical, totally necessary stuff like tightening bolts with giant wrenches while in cropped tops showing off their bulging, sweaty muscles or something.

And not what it was, which was mostly manipulating cranes with a sizeable amount of profanity and hitting things until they were in the right spot. Which was to say, engineering in its purest form.

Nevertheless, they got it done, and larger hull pieces began to stream in as Cia tested the new minecarts, which had just rolled out of the fabricator.

She was also pleased to receive a notification that the bunker was being expanded with some living quarters. Not great living quarters, basically just two cramped bunkroom and a room large enough to sit by and eat on a table. Always important for morale that. She'd even gotten hammered by enough of her mom's twenty first century memorabilia to understand why she referred to eating without a table as 'the greatest crime in the rimworlds'.

It was good to see that Cia could do it completely on her own. It was why she was there, but until now Sapphiria had kept a hand in every design. Here she'd left it to the simulacrum to sort out.

She was still hammering away when she received the ping.

"Ma'am." Said Cia, as soon as she pinged back. "I have finished cataloguing the emissions of the 'condensate' harvested from the creature. I believe the interface you wished for can be built shortly."