Chapter 393 - Buyout

Note :

Chapter 394 is almost complete, just was cut off from the last few hundred words by a TTRPG session. But hey, this one is a bit chonkier than usual.

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy the chapter ! Almost there !

Chapter 393

Red Sands Desert, Aurorean Empire

Capital City of Rebirth

Allya smiled, as Elkaryos stepped into her office.

"Welcome back. Is this summit proving to be every bit as...interesting as you'd expected?"

The dark elf smiled hesitatingly.

"In a way of speaking, your Imperial majesty." He flicked his glance at her clothing, including the medallion resting on her collarbone. An almost perfect copy of his. "Will you..."

"Be wearing the merchants guild's insigna in public? No, probably not. And certainly not for the coronation." That was still being organized, but she had already picked her outfit, with Alexandra's surprisingly enthusiastic help it should be noted. Turns out, sometimes, she did like to design stuff. "But I am not going to hide it either."

"Of course."

She looked at him, the gestured at the seat in front of her desk, and he took the hint, sitting down.

"So. I'm going to be a bit blunt. We have a few subjects I need to discuss with you. All of them are critical, in their own way. The first one, which I'm sure you saw coming, is financial."

Elkaryos' smile became less hesitant.

"We are master merchants, everything we do is supposed to be financial. But I am guessing this is about my shares."

It felt like a lifetime ago when they had negotiated the terms for the corporate dominion that had allowed her to buy Rebirth. Fourty five percent of the financing, and ownership, had gone to Elkaryos, with options for her and Pyn to buy it back share by share...to a minimum of fifteen percent ownership, which had been done remarkably quickly.

She had never, however, challenged his remaining fifteen percent. She could have when her barony became a frontier principality, and probably should have when she founded the archduchy.

Now, however...

"Yes. Having the capital of an Empire under partial corporate ownership is...problematical. It is no longer just a question of money, loyalty and authority, but also one of Imperial prestige." And also an internal security issue. The fact that the guild was moving against her and Alexandra had been no surprise, but there was no telling how deep their connections ran. "Thus, I would like to buy your last shares, at a considerable markup."

"I had guessed something like that was coming." He smiled. "Even at my...diminished ownership, Rebirth was by far my most profitable venture." Actually, according to her intelligence, it was starting to verge on being the majority of his income in mana, and not more esotheric forms of wealth like securities, debt or whatever the hell 'CDOs' were. Gods, she hated financial chicanery. "Still, I will freely admit it does rankle a bit."

The fact that he even admitted as such was a testament to how fundamental he had been to Rebirth's creation and how close he was to Allya herself. Others would have kept their mouths shut, nodded and said 'yes your imperial majesty, right away'.

"Oh I know. Which is why I have both a reward and a thankless task for you."

The dark elf tilted his head.

"Truly? How so?"

Allya smiled.

"Melia has been of a considerable help, but she is too busy to manage everything now." A massive understatement if there ever was one. She had to hire a small army of people to keep the poor woman from working herself to death, and it still wasn't enough. Just like even with Camille filtering her paperwork, she still had so much landing on her damned desk every day. "That means that her portfolio must be split. She will inherit the economy, and you..." She slid a paper to him, and his eyes went wide as he read it.

He looked up abruptly, meeting her gaze.

"You're making me minister of trade?!?"

"Yes. I need to constitute a ministerial cabinet, and quickly. You fit the bill."

"Your Imperial majesty, the conflicts of interest-"

"Would be considerable for any candidate." If there was one thing she'd learned as an assassin then as she ran Rebirth, it was that no one was truly uninvolved in what they believed in and were good at. And if they weren't, it meant they were neither competent nor a true believer. And Elkaryos was both excellent at commerce and a believer in free trade, which was exactly what she needed when her entire Empire still hinged on her control of the trade route running down the center of the continent, linking both halves of her domain together. "And I trusted you to hold fifteen percent of my domain, Elkaryos. That is more than I can say for almost anyone, let alone those qualified for the post. So take the damn nomination. Build me a ministry that'll last a thousand years, and I'm sure you'll have plenty of opportunities for your businesses and contacts without having to betray my confidence."

Elkaryos looked down at the paper again, and took a deep breath, nodding.

"I accept."

"Good." Allya searched her drawers, and pulled out an amulet, handing it over. "Here."

Elkaryos smiled as he hefted the piece of jewelry. It bore the heradlry of the Empire, which was a modified one of house Nouvelle-Aurore. A four pointed star, rising behind a planet. The difference was the gems. The leftmost point of the star held a sapphire, the rightmost a topaz, and the top a blood red ruby. And at the center of them all, an emerald.

The New Republic, the Asarian Kingdom, the Tark Hegemony and at the core, Rebirth. Each gem the color of one of the founding nations of the Empire.

Or...was it? Perhaps the ruby meant something else...

Or someone else. Standing above all the others, even the heart of the Empire itself.

The thought was driven out his mind before he could dive deeper, as he felt the thrum of power within it.

"It is not just a symbol of office to add to your collection." Explained Allya. "It is also an emergency escape. Crush this medallion, or speak a certain series of keyword, in sequence or just in a setence within thirty seconds of each other, and you will be teleported to safety."

"A teleport talisman? Those are...rare. And not necessarily all that reliable."

"I can assure you, from personal experience, that those work quite well."

He looked at the medallion, and put the chain around his neck, joining the collection of others clinking on his chest.

"Alright. Now, what do you need from your minister, your majesty?" He smiled. "Don't think I didn't notice the first thing to asked of me was to effectively swear fealty to you."

"Technically, the first thing I asked of you was to relinquish your shares of my domain. But I take your point." Allya leaned forward. "I need to ask you about princess Alfyris and the safehouses she built in Rebirth for the dark elf syndicate."

Elkaryos blinked. Whatever he had expected to be asked, this clearly wasn't it. The dark elf princess had moved out of Rebirth a while ago now, when Alexandra had lifted the siege of Darthar. And even before then, she'd made great efforts to be discrete, despite coming in with a literal battleship. Not that Allya had complained, given how instrumental that ship had proven in beating back the Hammer of Eternity's strike crafts.

"...Why do you ask?"

"Because there is a high possibility that these safehouses are being used to prepare a terrorist attack on Rebirth and the summit."

*****

Alexandra sighed as she adjusted the flight path of the stealth drone.

One of the problem of a stealth craft like this was that covert communications was...complicated.

They had no idea of the fully extent of the citadel's satellite net, for now at least. The Church had cleaned house after the Order's first nuke, but there was still a lot of debris and though the Citadel wasn't bothering to hide, she wasn't going to bet on them not sneaking a few discrete spy satellites on top of the obvious ones.

There were options, Seraph and their database were an encyclopedia on Sagitarian communication systems, but by far the cheapest, easiest and most readily available was to just have her possess the drone, and piggy back any data relays off of that.

As far as they could tell, that was effectively untraceable. Even at the height of the battle with the Hammer of Eternity, the Church hadn't managed to realize she had pillaged the supply ship, despite her possessing a golem on the assault team.

They weren't sure how, exactly, that worked in terms of data transmission. When she had some time to spare, IE almost never, Ghost dug a bit more into the dungeon core, but the core systems like dungeon core possession and material creation remained buried deep.

Which...was unsurprising. Given the original purpose they'd guessed at, the only thing more essential to its mission statement was mana generation.

In any case, as liberating as it was piloting a drone in the skies, it also got pretty boring pretty quickly. What she had was sand, sand, and more sand. And while they had the projected course of the expeditions, they weren't exactly hard waypoints, so retracing their steps wasn't just following a line. So she had to keep most of her attention here.

The first two they'd lost pretty quickly. Her guess was, they'd been picked up by one of the airship ones, who was almost impossible to track. This one however, was continuing a lot further than she'd expected, and-

She almost jumped as she got the ping.

The drone dropped in altitude, and went into full stealth as she throttled back the engine.

What the fuck. What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.

She scanned around, focusing the passive sensor array on the sector she'd received the smidge of data from.

There was a bit of wait. She had dropped altitude, so the quality degraded, but with the full array focused instead of sweeping the ground...

The sensors spat out their data.

She was getting IFF transponder signals. Sagitarian ones.

Three Hussard-class interceptors, a Valkryie heavy personnel transport and a Mirage tank.

Yeah, right. And she was santa claus. The interceptors had the code for the eleventh air brigade, which according to her databanks had been stationned on the other side of the planet, and that Mirage tank was marked as belonging to....well, Seraph, actually. Or at least her surface defenses. Uh.

Plus, those contacts were straight along the path the tracks had been heading towards.

Still, if they had functional transponders, it meant they had Old World tech.

It seemed she'd hit the jackpot.

She adjusted her flight path, and pinged Glitch. Time to gather some data.

As she approached her sensors began drinking in more and more.

First were the airships. One was in a highguard position, and unless she was seriously mistaken, it was an Erisian built missile corvette. Resolving its weapons was hard with passives only, especially as they weren't online, but she could tell some of them were Old World. Bigger than she'd expected. Not interceptors, but longer range air to air missiles. Meant for her blackbirds, clearly, but how were they planning to detect it?

Mmmhhhh...Their active sensor sweeps were purely Erisian magitech so far. Maybe they had a passive Old World array she couldn't detect.

The other three ships were either landed or in a low holding pattern. All flew IFF beacons, with the largest having the Valkyrie's while the other three had the Hussards'.

She watched as people began unloading the two landed vessels, the big and medium transport, and her eyes widened as she saw the tank roll out of the hold.

Okay. Perhaps they weren't completely lying. That was a mirage tank. And a couple of air defence batteries mounted on tank chassis, with plasma guns and interceptor missiles, like some mad mix of an ADATS-11 and a Super-Gepard Flakpanzer. Except with plasma cannons instead of lasers, as she'd been used to on Alpha Centauri. Databanks called them Shrouds, but none of them were running IFFs.

It looked like she'd arrived in the nick of time. Which was...weird.

They should have had a huge headstart. Even wasting time picking up other groups shouldn't have slowed them down that much.

She watched as they deployed the tanks, moving her drone lower. Thankfully, they seemed reluctant to turn on the active scanners, instead relying on passives only, which was...monumentally stupid for these kinds of air defenses.

Then they started unloading the transports in earnest, and she frowned.

What...those weren't Sagitarian vehicles. And why were they halfway destroyed?

She stared, in increasing horror, as they set up the vehicles like they'd been destroyed in an offensive...before putting a device neither she or her databanks could recognize at the heart of the 'battlefield', and withdrawing.

This wasn't some kind of rendez vous. They'd been setting things up like this. Why? She idly noted that the airships packed up quickly, and began moving towards Rebirth, the corvette in front.

Maybe they were trying to set up some kind of trail of evidence for an Old World attack? Trying to camouflage what was about to happen in the city itself, with their own people wielding the guns?

That made no sense. They had to know no one would even believe it. Besides which, they hadn't seemed all that interested in plausible deniability, at least from her analysis of their motives. She could be wrong, but-

Her sensors pinged her. The device in the fake battlefield was activating. It was dispensing...essence? And there seemed to be a considerable amount of signal traffic and sensor activity now. Almost as if a battle was taking place. She tried to keep up and record everything as her sensors were flooded with false sensor reports, communications, and...was that a distress call? Why would-

The drone's alarms blared, bringing her back from her speculation, and into the main sensor array, showing the rapidly retreating airships, the fake battlefield and the sands around it.

She watched in horror as the dunes began to move.

And in the far, far distance, sand surged into the air, kicked up into the skies as if by the footstep of a God.

Or by something gigantic piercing the surface.

Oh shit.