Chapter 54 - Spicy

Note :

Sorry for the late chapter, hadn't finished it in time. If you guys have any spice name suggestions, don't hesitate to make them ! I had a fair bit of a laugh making my own, and several of them are easter eggs.

Chapter 54

Starborn Mountains, Mount Nebula

Crash Site

"This'll do." Said Sapphiria as she retracted shoulder-mounted the machineguns, contemplating the target she'd just blasted to pieces.

It was, basically, just a pile of rocks with some recovered legionnary armor on top of it. Not the weird scale one, the one most heavily resembling what she envisioned romans wearing.

She'd done a dive on the subject, curious. And what she'd found was...worrying.

Very worrying.

There were differences, clearly, but not enough to justify convergent evolution. Someone on the other side had deliberately tried to make armor that looked roman. Which meant that, among the Empire that had spawned the Bane, there had been someone who had knowledge of Earth.

Worse, now that she looked at it, the scale armor looked Byzantine. And there had clearly been a lot of time and technological evolution between the two. That meant that there hadn't just been an individual at the top, there was a memory. Archives? Some grand plan? Impossible to tell.

But it meant that now she had another objective. Not just fight the Bane, but find out what had come before them. Because if someone had memories of Terra, then they almost certainly had some knowledge of what the hell happened here.

"Primitive, but the volume of fire does appear to overcome the structural integrity of the armor eventually." Said Cia. As usual, her opinion of firearms was...critical, to say the least, but her being forced to admit it worked cheered the AI up slightly for some reason.

"Well, hopefully they won't have to fire at the heavies. These guns are for keeping the small fry off my back. Speaking off, the targeting software?"

"Without extra processor modules, it cannot run on internal systems, but it is otherwise functional."

"Good." She'd programmed an autonomous targeting and firing system for the machineguns, so she didn't have to micromanage them. It wasn't great, and would still require a fair bit of micromanaging, but it would do. At least she had excellent IFF systems, thank the stars. "And running on internals is irrelevant. I can't live inside the android, so if we lose coms it'll just fall over."

Actually it would go into casualty recovery mode. Which was more or less the same except the armor would try to move to amplify the movements of someone handling it. That, plus the handles on the shoulder plates, would enable soldiers in standard combat armor to drag off fallen power armored troopers to a medic station or at least get them out of the line of fire.

The Federation had once tried to make the armor automatically return to a safe area when the person inside lost consciousness, but not only was it creepy as all hell, it led to too many problems. There just wasn't enough processing power inside the armor itself for that kind of autonomous movement in such a complex environment, constantly causing them to make the wrong move during tests and getting their operators hurt further.

Plus, squishies just disabled the function or flat out refused to wear the suits, and the Bureau of Personnel gave up.

It was also why she couldn't just step out of the armor and use it as a second combatant. It was purposefully designed not to be able to move without someone inside.

"Affirmative. I see that you have begun reviewing the uplift packages."

"I have." She'd specifically made a note of it in their shared simulation, which she used...less and less now, she was realizing. She was really starting to like using her hands and being in her android. "But I can't use them. I'll have to make my own."

"That...will be challenging." Slowly said the simulacrum, clearly picking her words with exquisite care. "Your competences do not rest within personnel management, let alone large scale social engineering."

The AI chuckled.

"That is the understatement of the century. But I'll have to make do."

"Perhaps recruiting personnel would be an option? All uplift packages rely on local stockholders being invested in the process."

Sapphiria froze.

Could she do that? Recruit Kalia and the others. Tell them everything?

Eventually the truth would have to come out. It was why she was trying to lie as little as possible. Let their own assumptions do the work. But so early as to design the whole process?

"...I can't. Not yet." She held up her hand as Cia opened her mouth. Or rather had her projection do so. "I am not objecting to the necessity of it. But right now, I simply can't. Too many things could wrong, and I don't know them well enough yet."

Cia hesitated, and nodded.

"Understood. What modifications to the packages are you envisionning."

"Well, first and foremost, this planet isn't a luddite colony. That will be a huge help, and we can scrap the sections related to that."

Most of the uplift packages assumed a low tech world would be so by choice, as any cataclysm great enough to wipe out the entire tech base would either have to happen when the colony was concentrated, usually pre-terraformation, or be so great as to either wipe out the population or render the planet non-viable. In any of those cases, low tech meant certain death, so the only thing to uplift would be ghosts and ashes.

There had been edge cases. Very few of them, but a handful of worlds had gotten hammered so hard they'd effectively been crippled yet survived. Most were rescued within a few generations though, so it was mostly a case of handing them back tech they still had a memory of, either passed down directly or with colonists who had handled it themselves.

This, as far as she was aware, was new territory. Clearly memories of Earth and higher technology lived on, but not enough to build off of.

One issue however is that while they may not be luddites, but they had magic. Especially as all of their tech seemed to have it incorporated, given how Ramina was basically unemployed due to lack of mana. They didn't seem to have grown suspicious of her tech not using magic, but that may be due to pure ignorance, and that wouldn't last long during the uplift.

Which meant learning more, without appearing as ignorant as she was. Fun.

"There will be pushback against the change in technological paradigm."

"Yes, but they won't reject technology on a fundamental level." Sapphiria grimaced. "Furthermore, and I hate to say it, but the Bane will be our biggest help here. They had to industrialize to get rid of their undead labor. They'll be willing to do a lot more to get rid of the skeletons trying to murder them."

"Uplift through military technological solutions?" The simulacrum blinked, and Sapphiria shivered as she felt a system check being run. "Ma'am, are you alright?"

"I'm fine, thank you very much. And I didn't say that. We don't need to teach them how to make nukes to tip the war effort. Upgrading factories, food production, housing...It will have a knock on effect. If it comes down to it...I will consider upgrading the capabilities in the military department. But there is a lot of things we can and should do first."

As she had pointed out what felt like years ago but was only weeks at most, there's no point defending the squishies if they're dead of starvation or hypothermia. In a low tech war, it wasn't the fighting that killed most people. It was the diseases, the starvation. It wasn't until humanity had truly, fully industrialized warfare that it had changed, mainly because vaccines and antibiotics made the diseases a lot less threatening -and slowed their spread considerably-, and things like fertilizers, mechanization and pasteurization allowed food to be produced on an immense scale and kept for an appreciable amount of time. They could start with that.

Hell, if nothing else, they were the necessary building blocks for the higher tech hardware to be viable.

"Understood." The simulacrum looked...happy. Very happy, in fact. "I would also like to inform you that the spice synthetizer is online and ready."

"Truly? That was...very fast."

"You had made it a high priority. It is also, uh...clearly designed for rapid assembly and deployment."

Sapphiria chuckled.

"Yeah, no kidding about that."

She'd delved into the archives about improving nutrigel's taste. As she'd already known, changing the gel itself always ended poorly. Squishies just didn't trust it, no matter how convincing the taste was. It triggered a kind of uncanny valley reaction.

Thankfully, her mom had done extensive research on it. Most of it wasn't complete, as in the end she'd opted for orbital farms to improve the food situation on Earth, back when she wasn't the President of the Terran Federation but at the helm of a moderately powerful megacorp.

Orbital farms weren't an option here, not by a long shot. But digging further she'd found a report by a little someone named Airah Starfire, one of her mom's best friends, who had catalogued that the Federation Marine Corps had developed spices for their emergency rations. Not officially, but most units deployed during the war against the Theocracy had to sustain themselves on the stuff at some point or another, and they'd cooked up some ways to make them more palatable.

She'd been surprised. As per Airah's recommendations, the spice recipes were gathered and standardized, plus a specialized synthesizer was made for them -general chemical synthesizers were never handed over to the Marines, or it would end up as a still by the end of the week-, but the knowledge of it was struck out of the databases for general colonial and civilian use.

As far as she could tell, reading between the lines, the upper echelons felt that while technically perfectly healthy on a physical level, making nutrigel better tasting might cause colonies to rely on it more and put less pressure on developping proper food solutions, which could have detrimental effects on morale and development.

It wasn't erased, someone doing the digging could find it in the libraries, it was just...not advertised. Which was simultaneously disturbing, and also something she could use for her uplift effort. It's not just what knowledge you give, it's how you frame it.

Moving to the fabricator required her to go through a few corridors, but that was a short hop in her freshly repaired armor.

One thing she'd terribly missed while out of it had been its mobility. And agility.

She may or may not have suffered some rather embarassing failures when attempting to leap into movement for the first few hours after exiting it. On the plus side, her android could take a lot of punishment. On the minus side, her bodysuit, the skintight underlayer, fit specifcially to be as comfortable as possible while wearing the armor, could not. Since she literally didn't have a replacement, she'd had to stand around awkwardly, naked, while Cia tried very hard not to laugh as she repaired the garnments in the fabricator.

She arrived at the pod, and tilted her head at the compact machine laid by its side. She could easily carry it around in her armor, though a human might find it unwieldy.

"Is that it? It looks a little small."

"The spices are only produced in limited quantities. They are...potent."

"Potent?"

The simulacrum shrugged.

"So the manual said. I have never tasted something, nor do I possess the means to do so on a physical sample. I cannot give feedback on this."

"Right. Let's make a pack then. What are the options?"

"Sunday Night, Beach Party, Your Sister, Officer Ballroom, Nutcracker Cannonade, Ourobouros, Frost Tongue, Aslan Special, Liquefied Camel, Fremen Melange, Roller Derby-"

Sapphiria held her hand up, while the other pinched the bridge of her nose.

Right. Marines. Of course the names sounded like the kind of narcotics squishies would take at a rave, and wake up a week later, wondering what the hell had happened and why they were wearing a jester hat with christmas ornaments instead of the bells.

"Just...make the first one on the list."

"Sunday Night it is then."

The machine hummed, clicked and even sighed at one point, before spitting out a small, seemingly plastic packet.

"The packaging is thin, edible and biological." Explained Cia. "Part of the process is making it, so that it can be carried in the field. Just drop it in and it will dissolve on its own, though some mechanical agitation will be required to spread the spice throughout."

"I see." The AI carefully opened the packet, and took a sniff.

She almost spilled it as she staggered back.

"Holy crap! What the fuck is that?!?" It felt like she'd inhaled an entire orange and then set it on fire with brandy.

"It is meant to be dissolved in two hundred and fifty times its weight of nutrigel." Chided the simulacrum. "Not inhaled."

"I wasn't trying to- Ack! I can taste it in my mouth!" She opened the back of the machine, where the bioprocess was, and just dumped it all in. "Alright. Well, if they want this stuff they can have it." She coughed. "Fucking hell."

"I would never question your choice in companionship, but despite being nicknamed the nether realm I doubt that-" Cia's sarcasm was thankfully interrupted by an alert. A minecart had rolled into the hub carrying a message!

It was short, and to the point:

'Ramina arrived at surface. Ready for workshop construction.'

"Well, it looks like the work never ends." Sapphiria disconnected the spice synthesizer, and grabbed it. "I'll be gone for a bit. Try not to crash the bots while I'm down."

"I shall endeavor to keep the catastrophic failures below your average."

Sapphiria glared at her, but it bounced off of the simulacrum like a stone on mech armor.

"See that you do." And with that, she took off.