Chapter 397 - Status

Note : Chapter 401 has been written and added to the queue, wrapping up book 10 !

I'll probably take a bit of a break, given how much I've been pushing myself. You guys enjoy the chapters and the end of the book ^^

Also, sorry for those I told chapter 398 would be posted today (with a special something you can certainly guess by the end of this one), I kind of miscounted.

Chapter 397

Red Sands Desert, Aurorean Empire

Wasteland

"Status report." Said Alexandra. Had she been in a human body, she would have been laying on her back underneath the reactor, though she'd never have squeezed in that space, even before she became a dungeon core and got her avatar.

Still, it was a useful representation for the simulation, and for one she enjoyed Emilia being the one to openly stare, as her simulated self wore a cropped tank top and a pair of technician shorts, AKA 'the pocket heaven'.

They had to put her inside one of the VR pods, everyone else could just be there natively.

"We've received the reports from the stealth golems." Said Ghost, as she knelt by Alexandra's side. "You were right. They've got the cores rigged to blow. And booby trapped to prevent tampering."

"Wonderful." The dungeon core closed her eyes, thumping her head against the floor. "Any ideas?"

"If we rush them fast enough, we may be able to destroy enough of the fuel lines and power cables to prevent the overload."

"But let me guess, some of the booby traps would make that hellishly difficult?"

"Yeah. They're not just glorified, magical mines either. Some of them are weird. Like, weird weird."

"I've tried to identify them, but I'd need more time." Said Emilia, able to speak, despite her eyes staying firmly on Alexandra's body and not her head. "And honestly to see them for myself. Not everything is on visible runes, and even sensors only go so far."

"Great." Alexandra huffed as she twisted a valve. "We're trying to disarm fusion cores while I'm rigging one to blow. Isn't that ironic." She moved to jam the fuel shutoff open, and then stopped. "Wait...Hold on. Didn't we steal the fuel from these ships? Will the power cores even work?"

"We stole some helium three, yeah, but I don't even know if it was for the power cores. And even if it was, we didn't take enough to make a difference. The stealth fuel golems aren't that big. Before you ask, yes, I considered venting the fuel tanks, but it would start alerts absolutely everywhere, and there's a bunch of failsafes for that scenario."

Alexandra shook her head.

"Not what I had in mind. Can you do the reverse? Get gas from the golems into the tanks?"

Ghost's eyes widened.

"You want to poison the fuel mix? That's..."

"Brilliant, is the word you're looking for."

"I was going to say 'daring', but yes, that works too."

They exchanged a smile.

"Girls, please, you're doing it again." Said Emilia. "Mind including me in the loop?"

"Sorry love." Said Alexandra, smiling the vampire, and making sure to stretch a bit, derailing the vampire's train of thoughts thoroughly. "Fusion reactors use very specific fuels to run. If you know what to put into it, you can completely screw the reaction. If you do it well, you can cause the reactor to go into emergency shutdown."

Ghost smiled wolfishly.

"And we designed the reactors for the dawnstars." Well, Allya's ancestor had finished them, under their supervision. "We know how to fuck these things up."

"Well, breaking things via engineering is what you do best."

Alexandra could have sworn she heard a muttered 'though not blowing it up in the process is out of character for you', but she decided not to comment on it. Given Ghost's face, she'd heard it to.

"Exactly."

"What about you?" Asked Ghost. "What are you doing?"

"IFF transponder is wired directly into an AI core. No way I'm doing this without raising any alarms. And I don't think I can beat an AI on its own turf. Not without a shitload more bandwidth than what I have to play with. So, I'm going to sabotage the tank's power core."

"Ah. Distraction?"

"And cleaning up the evidence." Alexandra grunted as she finished jamming the shutoff. The hard part wasn't holding it open, it was doing it in such a way that the system wouldn't shit itself. Yes, she had the engineering and maintenance overrides, but that only went so far. "The codes I got might work on the AI, but it's been jacked in post construction, so I doubt it. And if it's working with the guild, they've almost certainly done something to its loyalty protocols."

Ghost frowned.

"I didn't expect them to be using an AI."

"Perhaps it isn't one." They both turned towards Emilia, who shrugged. "If people could be transferred into dungeon cores, why not into AI cores? Neonites are a known science."

Alexandra met the apparition's eyes.

"That's...actually a very good point. And might explain a lot." Like how she'd been able to do this. The AI wasn't wired into everything, it was in the IFF and weapon systems, but a proper AI would have been given control over the full tank, and there'd have been no need for pilots. Plus, it would have detected instantly someone messing with the power core or, hell, her just overriding the maintenance hatch. She wasn't an idiot, she'd checked the internal data network and wiring to make sure that wasn't the case before she started messing with it. But at the time she'd thought it was just general paranoia towards the AI's loyalty. But what if it was someone in there, who just couldn't do what an AI would have been able to?

She'd had very harsh lessons on that field. She may be digitalized, but she'd never be as proficient as those born in this realm of data.

"Anything else?" Said Ghost, and Alexandra shrugged.

"Not yet. But once I'm done here the expedition will be completely screwed, so we need to act now. Where the heck is Allya?"

"She was on her way last I checked, she-"

"HOLY CRAP!"

They all turned their heads as Allya appeared, looking around wildly.

"Speak of the devil." Said Alexandra. "Welcome to virtual reality."

"It...Holy shit." Allya looked around, then touched her face. "It looks...feels so real."

"Hence the name." The dungeon core smiled. "You can do anything you want here. Even have sex. Reality is at your beck and call." She gestured, and a set of tools appeared, before vanishing.

"...Please don't tell Pyn."

"Don't worry, I won't."

Everyone looked at Emilia, who smiled.

"I prefer the real thing, don't worry. I'm sure she will too."

"R-Right." The Empress cleared her throat. "The preparations are finished. I have the guards deployed to contain the crowds. We just need the go signal for the parade to start."

Alexandra nodded. Since Ghost hadn't had the time to finish the ground combat AI, Allya had been saddled with planning that part of the response, with Seraph and CQ.

"Do it. Ghost?"

"I already have the golems being filled with the fuel poison."

"Excellent." Alexandra looked around. "Their setup takes time, but I can't afford to let the tank get back onboard their transport and discover I'm here, or start servicing it and find my sabotage. Once I blow this thing, I don't think we'll have long before the sand kraken starts ripping them apart. Once that starts, we have to be ready. Because they'll send a distress hail, and know something is wrong."

"Got it." Ghost smiled. "We should have synchronized watches."

Somehow, she dodged the wrench Alexandra threw at her.

"Shut the heck up. Allya, sorry to have made you come all the way down here to get you back out so quickly."

She could have done the meetings in other ways, but this was the least distracting one, somehow, and she needed all the focus she could scrape up.

"Oh I'm in the military entrance."

The dungeon core blinked, and looked at Ghost, who shrugged.

"Doesn't matter where the VR pod is, does it? I just put it inside one of the shielded elevator pods."

"...Alright, fair enough."

"I'll get things rolling. Star the celebrations, get the crowds gathered. Try not to get us all killed." Said Allya.

"No promises."

They all smiled, and the Empress logged off. So did Emilia.

"What are our chances?" Asked Ghost.

"High on my end, I think. I just need to get the kraken to look instead of follow at a distance, and shit will go sideways. Backup ready?"

"Had to hammer the warhead in, but it fits. Barely."

"Good. And what do you make of your chances?"

"If I can get to the tanks, either the valves shutoff and the core goes cold or they don't and the reactor scrams. Or, you know, fail. Just not catastrophically."

A poisonned reactor core may make a mess, but it wouldn't go up like a nuke. Which was why one of the emergency shutdown method for some of the civilian ones if things went truly to shit was to actually deliberately poison the fuel mix. Not something contemplated for military designs, for a variety of reasons, including 'blowing up is a feature', but hey.

"And the whole parade and police operation?"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

Given that her guess hovered between 'utter shitshow' and 'complete disaster', that wasn't encouraging, but she nodded.

Sometimes, the duty of the captain was to look calm and composed even while screaming internally at their rapidly approaching death. She wasn't fooling Ghost, just like a captain could never fool a good executive officer, but they both knew this song and dance well enough.

"Alright then. Let's finish this mess."

*****

"Targets sighted."

The squad flattened itself to the dunes as the pointman spoke. In the dark, they were practically invisible to the naked eye even without cloaking, but it was better not to take risks.

Ten men wasn't very good. But it was all that Orzal Vek, former colonel of the Elkis Republic, could scrape up on such short notice. After his little stunt with the makers of the brands, he'd felt it was best to keep a low profile and disperse his strike teams.

That was, of course, until the damned adventurers guild did something stupid.

"How many?" Asked the former colonel.

"Five. Four transports, one corvette."

"Shit. What are they doing?"

"Preparing to roll back in."

Orzal crawled up to the pointman, and looked over the crest of the dune. Wordlessly, the other man handed him a pair of what he would have called binoculars, but they called rangefinders.

He looked through the device, slotting it against his power armor's visor, and gritted his teeth.

Fuck.

"That's a lot of hardware."

"Most of it is wrecked, sir."

The colonel blinked.

"What?" He took a second look, and noticed that some of the tanks were indeed rather more full of holes than they should be. "Damn. Good catch." Rule one, when shown up by the troops, praise them. Never be too proud to be corrected. If you couldn't afford to because it would undermine your authority, you shouldn't be in command to begin with. "What the heck is this all for?"

"No idea sir. But they're pretty well armed even with these destroyed. I count at least three functional grav tanks."

"Can we take them?"

"Normally I'd say yes, but that's two Super-Gepards. Missiles are out, anything we fire at them will get shredded before it even clears its first stage booster. That means direct fire only. At which point we either kill the Mirage in the first volley or we're going to become one with the sand."

"Wonderful. We need backup."

"...Can they get there in time? They're getting pretty close to Rebirth."

"I don't know." Frankly answered the former colonel. "I don't know. But I don't know what the hell they're doing out here. And I'd like to before we blindly try to stop them."

If nothing else, it would give them a better chance, even if this was looking like a suicide mission right now. Fucking Joachim, couldn't his vaunted spies do their damned jobs for once?

Though, to be entirely fair to the man, his job was dealing with problems, nor getting intelligence. Since that had meant saving Orzal's own ass and promoting him through the ranks at records speed, perhaps he should be a little more thankful.

Fat help extra stripes were to him in this shitshow though.

"No clue sir. It looks like they're trying to make some kind of battlefield, but out of Old World wrecks? That's a lot of money they're pissing down the drain. Some of these aren't stripped of salvageable tech too. Not all of it at any rate."

"Right. Okay, fireteam Echo, I need you to get ahead of them. We should be able to keep up in the-"

Night turned into day, and he recoiled, even though the armor and rangefinder both immediately tinted in reaction to protect his eyes.

"What the fu-" He watched as a plume of energy just vomitted out of the Mirage tank. His armor pinged him about something he didn't quite understand. An IFF sweep?

Then he felt it.

The sand, vibrating, shaking.

All around him, the dunes started to move.

His face went white.

He had done his fair share of operations in the wasteland. One of the reasons his men had been so loyal is that he hadn't hesitated to slog into the desert with them when it was necessary, at least before the Republic threw him behind a desk.

He was also one of the few people alive that had seen this exact thing happen, and lived to tell the tale.

"RUN FOR IT!" He screamed to his men. "RUUUUUUN!"