[MFR] Chapter 52 - Armor Off

Notes :

Heya, sorry for the delay. I did a ping on discord warning about it but couldn't do a patreon post. I spent the whole day moving around and some transportation issues meant I wasn't able to get home as early as I had orginally wanted.

And yes, the chapter title is because it's the only thing I could remember of note from it when I sat down to set it up for upload. You'll see for yourselves.

Chapter 52

Starborn Mountains, Mount Nebula

Crash Site

Sapphiria wasn't sure if she should be screaming, cackling or puking as she hurtled down the rails on her rickety minecart, holding on for dear life.

She knew, intellectually she knew that unless she did something profoundly stupid, the minecart wouldn't derail or throw her into a wall. And that even if that happened she'd probably still be fine, even with her damaged armor.

But there was a part of her neural matrix that still belonged to a very distant primate for whom anything faster than a dozen kilometers per hour was a death sentence, screaming at the back of her mind.

She emerged into the crash site like a bullet out of a gun barrel, before coming to a stop with the impossible smoothness of magnetic brakes.

There was a second where she just stayed there, huddled inside the contraption, before disembarking, her legs wobbling.

Of course, Cia was waiting for her. And was that...was she wearing a maid uniform?!?

Sapphiria blinked, and then it was gone, the simulacrum back into a proper military uniform. Had she imagined it?

"Welcome home ma'am. I see your safari went well. Would you like a cup of tea, to wash off the dust of the trail?"

Sapphiria grunted.

"Cia. First and foremost, you know I drink hot chocolate. Secondly, I believe we have more important stuff than frivolities right now."

"Understood. Status report then. We have stockpiled enough materials on the surface to begin construction of the workshop for the snowpiercer. Analysis of the monster parts is ongoing as their stealth has begun to fade. It is..." She hesitated. "Troubling."

"How troubling are we talking about?"

She forwarded a set of files, and Sapphiria dove into them.

Abnormal DNA. Par for the course. Entire body parts that were just wrong. And the readings...exotic energy at every level. Organelles that would take some truly impressive mental gymnastics to see as mitochondria. A cell membrane that looked more like a forcefield than a physical structure.

It had the fundamental building blocks of what she'd recognize as organic life. DNA, even if twisted. Powered by ATP. But there were just layers of stuff she wasn't even remotely qualified to touch on or even make guesses at.

"Well...shit." She remembered what Paul had said. Mana tempests changed things. She'd thought he meant like a kind of radiation storm some places had. Heavy exposure causing death or cellular damage.

It seemed it was more literal. A lot more literal.

"Indeed."

Sapphiria shook her head.

"Well, better get prepared for fighting these things then. Especially if they're this...strange, I have to be ready. We do have the specs of my shoulder attachment points, right?"

"Affirmative. But there are no compatible weapons in the databanks."

"I know. It's time to make some. We can even use some of what we make as an upgrade for the turrets." She winced, as she remembered how hard those things had been to kill. Moreover, how...determined they'd been. She'd thought they'd be like animals, or at least have a functioning self preservation instinct, but instead they charged forward like bots on a mission, or-

Or like Theocracy xenohorrors.

"Cia?" She said. "Do me a favour, and run the scans we took of these things against the data we have about Theocracy bioscience, especially for military applications. Xenohorrors, cellships, worldtrees. The works."

"Understood." The simulacrum hesitated. "Ma'am, for designing your shoulder weapons...Your armor has taken considerable damage."

"It'll fix itself."

"Affirmative. But the process wil take time, and not only are the shoulder pieces heavily damaged, but the armor itself is heavily compromised. May I recommend removing it and placing it in the laboratory module for analysis, so it can then be put in the fabricator for accelerated repair?"

Sapphiria opened her mouth to reject the idea, then closed it.

They had the riotbots to analyze, but then again they hadn't taken damage from the elder...thing. According to Kalia, since she killed the first one, she got to name it. Wasn't that a joy.

Plus, if her armor was compromised, it could spell disaster. What if the squishies were attacked? But with it in the fabricator or undergoing analysis, she wouldn't be able to just sprint out to the rescue.

Short term risk for long term gain, or the opposite?

Plus, the simulacrum had a point about the shoulder mounted guns. She could design them, but there was no way she could properly test and calibrate them without the armor fully repaired. She'd learned harsh lessons with her little laser rover missing an oblivious skeleton with its gun on that front.

She sighed.

"Fine. Let's do it." She took a deep breath, and ordered her armor to disengage.

It was like suddenly being locked in a sarcophagus. One second she'd been in a mobile suit of death and destruction, as if wearing a second skin. The next she was encased in unyielding plating and artificial muscles.

She did the proper, full shutdown procedure for maintenance. She could just step out of it, but for these kind of things it was better to remove it piece by piece. Normally you had an attendant or a bot for this, but she did it alone, waving off one of the construction bots Cia rolled over to help.

Clumsy, armor clad fingers removed her helmet. Then her collar and shoulder pieces.

She followed the manual to the letter, moving onto her arms, peeling off the armor until she slid off the gauntlets and freed her fingers.

Finally, she latched onto the armor plate, and sighed as it detached, freeing her chest.

Cia's eyebrow rose at the sudden...rise in volume, and Sapphiria had the good grace to blush.

Just because she'd been willing to substantially reduce the height of her avatar didn't mean she was ready to compromise in other areas. She did have some ego. Besides, it was a fraction of the mass per volume of the rest of her body, and as demonstrated by her armor, could be compressed quite handily.

Though she wished it would be compressed under very different circumstances...

She shook her head, and moved on, removing the flexible, more lightly armored sections that gave her full range of movement. Then the reinforced hip section, and the legs, finally stepping out of each boot.

She looked at the pile of armor, tilting her head.

When had she last been out of it? Not since she'd crash landed, at least. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that this particular android hadn't been out of its armor in a decade, as she had used other, taller avatars for tasks. Its purpose, after all, was to always be loaded into the pod when she needed it.

She took a deep breath, and stretched. Damn, it felt good to actually move around without several centimeters of artificial muscles and high density armor on every bodypart.

Well, it's not like her avatar was made of different stuff, but still.

"Wow. I'd forgotten how this felt. I really should get out of this thing more often."

"Affirmative." The simulacrum looked uneasy. "The manual for these kind of operations recommend using the ambassador android for at least a third of the day cycle to preserve mental balance. However, your ambassador and combat unit are one and the same..."

"I know. But that kind of tweaking is how we got the lab module." Not that it had proven staggeringly useful as of late. Illuminating? Certainly. But she simply lacked too much base knowledge about this world and magic for it to reach its full potential. Which meant acquiring said knowledge, which was going to be a...problem.

Furthermore, given where she was preparing to go, it would probably be for the best if she acquired it before leading an expedition into what was apparently a magically twisted hellscape of epic proportions.

Wasn't that going to be fun.

"Understood." The simulacrum watched as Sapphiria lifted the chest piece and placed it in the laboratory module, arranging the rest to be fed to it in the order of most to least damaged.

There was a rumble, and she looked over her shoulder at another minecart coming down, her surviving riotbot incongruously perched half inside and half out of it. It looked like an adult trying to ride a tiny children's go-kart, and she chuckled.

"We're going to need bigger minecarts. Eventually, I mean."

"We are, but they will either require different rails or be considerably more expensive for an equivalent volume of cargo."

The AI nodded.

"Yeah. But having the capability to bring up, or down, some heavier stuff would be neat. Plus it's not like we have a choice. We're going to need to widen some of the damned tunnels to make room for some of the snowpiercer segments." She'd managed to redesign some of the worst ones to be able to finish assembly in the workshop, but there was only so much she could do without starting to compromise the structural integrity of the vehicle itself. "Speaking of, how's it going on that front?"

"The plans are ready to enact, and we have sufficient materials for the supports. We are ready to begin digging on command. Though be warned, starting this project will considerably reduce our current material intake."

"I know, I know...but we need to get started. Put a couple of drones on it. Slow but steady wins the race."

"Understood."

"And while I'm designing these new guns for my shoulders, tell me about those uplift packages."

*****

Sapphiria whistled softly as she turned the screwdriver, inspecting the mount, before using the advanced technique of 'hit it against your workbench' to verify it held tight.

Truly, the pinnacle of engineering prowess. Her aunt would be proud.

She frowned, as she looked at the files in the corner of her vision.

When she'd talked to Cia about giving the squishies higher technology, she'd worried about handing them the keys to the kingdom.

Fortunately, every one of the uplift packages agreed that giving the squishies a turnkey upgrade was a terrible, terrible idea. It was a widely accepted -though still disputed in some circles- theory that when one's technological evolution outpaced your social one, your social system tended to implode. World War One, with its monarchs still behaving like they were in the Renaissance or the Napoleonic wars, was the most cited example, but some also used the Terran Hegemony War, where sapient AIs, thermonuclear fusion, life extension technology and interplanetary colonization outpaced humanity's social progress and caused the madness that eventually escalated into the horrors of unrestricted nuclear and biological warfare.

The Federation had been purpose built to prevent exactly that. Well, no, not exactly, it had been built first and foremost as a three way compromise between the Colonies, the Fleets and Arcadia, to avoid killing each other, but it had quickly evolved into making sure such leaps and their subsequent implosions never happened again.

Which harkened back to her whole speech to the simulacrum as to the differences between AIs and humans when it came to technology.

In any case, the uplift packages had solutions for a remarkably rapid, but still carefully paced technological and social evolution. There was one issue.

They assumed complete control. The Federation simply didn't do uplifts on worlds it couldn't control and direct the trajectory of. It just wasn't done. They weren't about to hand over such technology to some random world in the boonies.

So the packages assumed you had a cruiser in orbit, and the promise of Federal retribution and/or assistance if things went wrong at the bare minimum.

She didn't even have anything in orbit, let alone a warship, much less the Federation to call on for help.

But stars damn it, Cia was right! She couldn't just become their technological sugar mommy, holding it all to herself and leaving the squishies to scramble in the dirt, waiting for whatever handouts she deigned give them.

She sighed, setting down the mount.

So. That meant that she, an engineering track officer who had a...complex relationship with squishies, to say the least, had to design a new type of uplift package, by combining bits of pieces of the others, with no safety nets in case things went horribly, horribly wrong.

Wonderful.