[MFR] Chapter 45 - Survey

Chapter 45

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Starfire Pass

Click click clik clik, reverse.

The Hand watched as the soulless worked to expand the fortifications, absent mindedly rolling the coin across their knuckles.

Things had been...quiet. They had expected a response. Any kind of response, truly. But so far, all was normal.

It seemed their enemies had more pressing issues. For now, at least.

Bringing the soulless to task had been easy. The tools from the destroyed mining operation were mostly in good condition, and soulless or not, some instructions were well understood. Contrary to the abominable automata the rebels used, there was no need to lay out every single command, every action.

Still, things were going slower than they would have wished. The soulless were effectively tireless, but there was so much to do, and so little time or resources to do it.

The bulk of the work needed to be done before the soil froze and the snow held. Not just because of how it would slow the work, but what would come with it.

The monsters that would flow out of Icerend would only be distracted by the rebels for a time. Eventually, they would assault him. They would be repelled, but that would bring any meaningful progress down to a screeching halt.

They had been promised reinforcements, to defend against what was coming, but they were too wise, and had done too much, to rely on the promise of coming salvation.

Besides. Even if said reinforcements arrived, there was no guarantee it would save them.

Distracted or not, their enemies would come. Of that they were grimly certain. And when they did, they would fall on them like a thunderbolt.

*****

"We need better recon." Said Sapphiria as she drove in the sensor spike, running a series of software tests as she brought it online, while keeping an eye on the rover's data, as it stood a few hundred meters away, just in case. "The rover can't navigate the surface, and even here it's..." She took a look at the first thing she'd constructed, or at least its icon in her vision. "Not optimal. We need some other solutions. Surface first though, we need better eyes than Kalia's people."

"Agreed." Said Cia. "May I suggest survey drones?"

The AI shook her head.

"Too large, and too energy intensive. They'd take forever to recharge and they'd see very little for that price." Survey drones were the stuff you deployed from shuttles during the initial stages of exploring a planet. They could have their own power supply, but by and large they didn't. Why bother? It's not like they were going anywhere or reporting to anyone without it. And for those that had, she couldn't make the fusion cores anyway. "Plus, how do we even communicate with them? If we build a relay tower it'll just be an 'attack here' sign."

"Perhaps that may be desirable?"

Sapphiria grimaced.

"The same thought occurred to me a while back. Use it as a lightning rod to focus enemy attacks. That's all well and dandy until it's of actual vital importance and you risk losing it."

The simulacrum stayed silent, seemingly in deep thought as the AI finished the test, and pinged the network.

"Alright. We're done here." Said Sapphiria, as she recalled the rover. "You know, if this place is indeed a PDC, we seem to be extremely close to the...logistics hub..." She stopped. "Cia?"

"Yes ma'am?"

"Get me the schematics for every PDC on record. If we don't have them in the archives pull everything, even just diaries, about how they were structured." She started sprinting back towards the crash site, the simulacrum's hologram hovering in front of her.

"Why?"

"The pod is good but it's no kinetic penetrator, and the navigation systems aren't insane." They were gone sadly, so she couldn't access the logs to see why in all the hells it had sent her here. The navicomputer had been onboard the disposable first stage that had separated from the pod shortly after launch. The pod had some cold thrusters for emergency adjustments, but to allow it to get anywhere in a star system it had needed a fusion engine. And there was no way to hide that, so you needed some sleight of hand, and a sacrificial decoy. "They wouldn't have a map of the planet but it wouldn't have sent us screaming down at a high angle or at ridiculous velocities. We came in low and slow. That mean we couldn't have penetrated far, not through solid rock, especially not with...whatever the hell is affecting this mountain. If we'd had the velocity to do that, the pod would have bounced off the atmosphere." It was hard to grasp for some, but just like water was effectively solid if you went fast enough, so was the air. Well, it was more complicated than that with gases, you created a compression wave that would push you back -or if you went fast enough, literally turned the air you hit into a star by injecting enough energy from the impact to cause the atoms to undergo thermonuclear fusion-, but for most people it was a simpler explanation than delving into complex aerodynamics. "So that can only mean one thing..."

The simulacrum actually looked shocked.

"We crashed into the entrance."

"Or the hub behind it. The entrance itself probably gone, PDC or no, given the impact." They were tough, but far from invincible. Mass was their greatest defense, and truth be told the only true reason for their existence. At the time a few hundred meters of rock were still better than even the best starship armor. They had other advantages, true, but this was the primary reason why they were built...and why the monstrosities built from asteroids like the Olympus Mons superfortresses eventually replaced them. At least those could dodge. For some value thereof at least. "But if we're close enough...we might be able to make another way out. At least we should be able to use some survey scanners." The reason why she hadn't used remote scanning for this warren of tunnels was because it just wasn't possible, not at any kind of range anyway. Anything that only reacted with the tunnel walls would bounce madly with every turn and kink of the shafts, causing everything to dissolve into static. Seismic sensors worked, but only for large scale geological formations. It could detect an exploitable deposit of iron ore, but it wouldn't have very good information about a cave system. Survey scanners, however big and unwieldy they were, worked at short ranges if you were willing to give them the juice. It was why they were mounted on drones and not the shuttle. "Put some on the schedule."

"Yes ma'am, right away."

*****

Sapphiria frowned as she looked at the readings.

Making the scanners had taken some juggling around on the fabricator schedule, but luckily she didn't need the batteries or all the auxiliary systems.

Granted, she looked ridiculous pushing around her hastily repurposed minecart, whose wheels actually worked pretty decently on the laser smoothed floor, so long as she didn't get too close to the swath of destruction her escape pod left in the floor. But at least it was cheap and easily available. Plus, she had more than she could use, as the second lane for her minecart network was still being deployed, so right now she was limited to either one minecart or one direction.

"Well. No easy way out for us." The surface was far enough that the scanners couldn't reach it, which wasn't that surprising.

What was slightly surprising was how completely fucked the area was. There definitely was more to this rock than 'mere' thermal dispersion. It seemed to have reacted like...well, like ablative armor. Or a car's crumple zone, sacrificing the surface layers to preserve the deeper zones.

Unfortunately, that meant there were two ways out. The first one was going around the rubble, and she wasn't sure if that would work very well, as there was a fair chance she might be at the end of some natural formation protecting the entrance, like a canyon or a mountain pass. It had seemed fairly common in the data Cia had dug up, mostly documentaries about the Interplanetary Wars and the Terran Hegemony War. Plus given this 'crumple zone' behavior she didn't know how far to the sides the effect had extended.

The second solution was simpler. Just dig straight in, and try to more or less go where the entrance was.

That was...dangerous, if it wasn't done slowly and carefully. But she had bots. Actually, she had something even better.

"Cia?"

"Yes ma'am?" Said the simulacrum as her projection appeared.

"You said we were starting to get at the limit of our range on the first mining shaft with the drones right?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Bring them here. I have a new project for them."

The simulacrum glanced at the pile of debris, and her eyebrows rose.

"Is this wise?"

"I'd rather not entirely depend on the mines to reach the squishies. Plus, if push came to shove...I can't house them down here. No materials to harvest to feed the nutrigel vats. And I don't want to bet their lives on ventilation and life support I don't control. But I could evacuate them through the underground to another location. It'd be hell and we'd probably lose a lot of them, but..." She squeezed her eyes shut. "Better than losing them all."

Stars she hated those kind of calculations. How did her mom do it? Her aunt? Their lives had been dedicated to these kind of equations. Hell, the entire founding of the Federation had happened because of it.

The Joint Fleets hadn't defeated the hivemind. Not truly. Her mom had built an ample arsenal of planetkiller missiles as part of Project Hegemon. The fleets might have destroyed her naval fleet but both sides had the firepower to wipe each other out.

They just hadn't had the will. Especially not after her mom almost killed her aunt when she shot the Dawnstar out of the skies of Earth.

In the end, they went with the solution that would cost the least amount of lives.

"...Understood." Said the simulacrum. "I assume greater reinforcements would be required?"

"Yes. That tunnel must hold. Do the digging carefully too." Pulse drills were about the most delicate way one could mine, surprisingly enough, but there were limits. "We'll have minor cave ins constantly, but I think it's doable. Plus...." She looked up at the at the ceiling of the cavern. "This place is a lot tougher than I gave it credit for. We might lose the drones, but I don't think the entire chamber will collapse. Otherwise it would have already."

The simulacrum looked at her, then the giant pile of debris from the cave-in behind the pod.

"Yes, yes, I know." Said the AI. "My point is, I think that's the tunnel leading to the entrance, but the logistics hub was made of sterner stuff." That or it was indeed made of some kind of crumple zone, and the pod had finished its course inside a new one. Which...would make sense. Her documentaries on PDCs said they had layers of armor through the rock, usually for thermal dispersion of high energy attacks -also known as 'nuclear bombardment'-, usually with one protecting the entrance, another the logistics hubs, one of the primary weapon systems and the two final layers covering the command center and AI core respectively. Well, AI core and all the deeper systems that allowed the PDC to even function.

It was a cold, cold calculation that, push came to shove, it was more important to save the computers controlling the guns than the squishies giving the orders.

"Very well. Where shall we begin?"

Sapphiria pointed at the far side of the room, and smiled.

"I'm confident in my extrapolations, but not completely crazy either. The tunnel will have to be person sized however. I want to be able to usher the squishies through, and I don't want to risk having to expand it."

"Understood."

"And if at all possible, make it minecart sized as well. Probably gonna need to get some materiel through if we do get anywhere."

The simulacrum nodded.

"Very well. Speaking of, we have a received a message from the surface."

Oh, right. The bot doing the milk run should be coming down to the mining hub right about now.

"What does it say?"

"It says 'monster attack, need to talk'. What-" Cia blinked.

Sapphiria was already out of the room and sprinting up the tunnel, leaping over one of the minecarts.