Chapter 41 - It Always Starts With Dinner

Note : Chapter 43 and Chapter 372 of The Fallen World have been written and added to the queue !

The Beach Episode. It is done.

Chapter 41

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Settlement of Astralis

"This is amazing! So all of your...batteries, was it, can do this?" Asked Kalia as the demonstration finished, holding out her hands towards the 'heater'.

"In theory, yes, but these ones have been modified so it can be done safely and easily." Nothing was truly foolproof, but there were some pretty thorough safeguards when anything meant to be used by squishies involved radiation. "Plus the batteries you already have are needed to power up the nutrigel vats."

"Of course. Still, this is amazing." Kalia smiled. "A few of these will make a great difference."

"I can do more than 'a few'." The mage-magistrate's gaze flickered, and Sapphiria blinked. "Yes?"

"...Even with your lack of mana?"

"You'd be amazed what one can do with little magic." Which, for that matter, was entirely correct without quite touching upon the fact that she didn't even know how to use magic. She was analyzing what she'd seen so far and drawn some conclusions, but it was like observing a microwave by sticking an egg in it and trying to divine how it functioned. What was the quote again?

Ah yes, 'like a monkey playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out.'

She was getting a surprising amount of wisdom from her mom's obsession with the twenty first century.

But it did bring a terrifying possibility: what if magic required you to be alive to use it? Or interact with it? Well, not alive alive, the undead seemed to be able to use it as well, but what if there were something like...souls?

She shook herself as Kalia sighed, realizing she'd spaced out.

"My apologies, I didn't mean to be abrasive. I was just worrying you were compromising yourself for us."

"Don't worry about me. I'll be fine." She would die in a heartbeat to save a bunch of squishies, there was absolutely zero questions about that, but it wasn't necessary right now. Besides, she took the oath, but it didn't mean she had to be stupid about it. After all you can't save even more squishies if you're dead. "Have you started using the building blocks I sent?"

"Yes! They were most helpful. Concrete isn't something we can really make with our resources, and it's saving wood to use elsewhere."

"That's good." She couldn't ship that much metaconcrete to the surface, but her bot doing the daily courier run -or any other going to the surface for that matter- picked up some with whatever capacity it had free. Which was usually a fair bit. "It should also be better at keeping the heat in."

And then some. Certainly better

She could start making colony domes. Basically giant spheres of reinforced metaconcrete with a sizeable underground area, that could be scaled up to house anything from a hab block to a TLV-12 (TerraLuna Vector series, model twelve) thermonuclear reactor, the model that was made to power the Federation's ecumenoplises and megastructures. It wasn't the largest power core ever built simply because the Federation had made the unholy abomination that was the TLX-9, made to power Sol's defensive batteries in case someone knocked out the solar array. That reactor was so large it actually deserved the title of 'artificial star'.

There were several upsides to these domes. First and foremost, they were thick and insulated enough that their outside environment was almost meaningless. They worked on barren rocks without an atmosphere, pre-terraformed Venus style hellworlds, and Theocracy terraformed worlds filled with xenohorrors, you name it. They held in heat, atmosphere, everything. They were also insanely durable. You could literally fire artillery shells at them and they'd be fine. They weren't made to survive literal nukes like hab towers were, but they could take pretty much everything smaller. It was both by design, and a holdover from the buildings they'd evolved from, which were the lunar domes of the United Interstellar States Navy, built in case another battle of Luna happened and this time they weren't the victor, to protect vital assets and force the enemy to either completely crack the surface of the moon or take the surface installations via direct infantry assault.

Irony was of course, there was a second battle of Luna. The UISN were just the ones attacking, trying to breach Earth's defenses to force her mother's hivemind to surrender during the war that eventually lead to the Federation's founding. No one had ended up attacking the domes, they just weren't worth the effort, not when the entirety of Earth's Orbital Defense Grid was trying to kill you. A few were still up, mostly as museums of the various wars that had shaken the solar system. She'd visited one when her mom had taken her to visit Luna, it was pretty cool, with giant models of the various ships involved at the time, some cut in half for you to look into the cross sections. Her aunt had spent half the visit making snide comments about the UIS and trading barbs with Ciel, before covering each other in backhanded compliments and raiding the gift shop's supply of miniatures. Pretty much a typical family outing for her in short.

But to be this sturdy, they were also industry and labor intensive to build. Colony supplies were designed to be cheap, easy to assemble -and hard to fuck up-, but they also assumed you had, you know, an entire colony ship on hand. A colony ship that, even in their earliest iterations when her mom was still a CEO and her aunt a space cadet, was half factory by volume. And that was for ships meant to go a dozen light years from Sol at most, whose colonies would be dependent on Earth for supply runs and could rely on the homeworld for assistance. The Federation's colony ships, let alone the arks that had setup the borderworlds, were a hundred times the size and had more industrial capacity than most space habitats.

She'd need to make some notes for when -if- she got back to Earth, that they'd need a whole new suite of systems based on fabricator time efficiency rather than resource consumption.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

"Anything will retain heat better than those huts." Said Kalia, her voice dripping with irony. "But, it's what we could make, and it sure beats being out in the snow."

"Agreed. Either way, I will try to get some deliveries out ASAP."

"Will that delay your vehicle?"

"Surprisingly enough, no. I need to make a ton of batteries for it as well. Plus it'll take more time to make the hull and assemble it."

"Hull?" Kalia blinked. "What the hell are you making?"

"It's called a snowpiercer. It-" 'Pierces snow' was perhaps a bit too light hearted. "-has considerable capabilities in operating in cold environments for extended period of times and get a lot of people in and out of inhospitable areas."

"As well as pierce snow, presumably." Kalia tilted her head. "I've gotta say, I've never heard of such a vehicle. Nor of people being overly fond of such transportation back then."

Sapphiria crossed her arms.

"One cannot fault me for their lack of vision."

Kalia chuckled.

"No, I suppose not." She hesitated. "Will you...join me for dinner? Not just nutrigel too. The foraging parties looking for medicinal herbs also pick up whatever they can get their hands on, and they brought some pretty good mushrooms."

Sapphiria blinked. Wouldn't mushrooms be killed by the cold anyway? She shook her head as some of her knowledge base popped up on the subject.

"Sure."

"Great! Come on then." Sapphiria realized too late what she had done as the mage-magistrate grabbed her hand.

Holy crap, is this a date?

*****

"So there haven't been that any more attacks?" Asked Sapphiria. Thankfully, even when flustered, she had shop to fall back to for small talk, and trying not to think about the fact that they were both alone in a closed, and effectively soundproof room.

"Nope. None. The density of wandering undead has dropped massively."

"That's weird. How did that happen?"

Kalia grimaced.

"The Hand could have simply sent some patrols to gather them up. But that's unlikely. They wouldn't have gotten it done so quickly or without the scouts spotting the activity." She sighed. "It's far more likely that there were far fewer 'rogue' undead than we were lead to believe. And that the attacks upon the lumberjacks were organized and choreographed operations."

Sapphiria tilted her head, and nodded. It brought back to mind the 'randomly wandering' undead in her tunnels that somehow had always gotten back to the hub and the tunnel leading to the Hand's...base? Actually, she realized she still had no clue where that tunnel ended up at. Might be worth finding out, if it was outside the valley it might be a significant problem, even collapsed, especially if she retook the pass. In any case, they hadn't ever ended up in the tunnel leading to Astralis.

"I've encountered a few things that had led me to believe they might not be randomly moving about, but this seems to confirm it. It would serve as reconnaissance without being reconnaissance, and at the same time scattering tripwires about for incoming attacks. As for the attacks, they were probably to keep you from putting your nose in the mines."

"Which I did because of the damage they were causing." She shrugged. "Lucky I did though, because we encountered our salvation there."

The mage-magistrate smiled, and Sapphiria blushed, shifting slightly.

"Why thank you. But we're not out of the woods yet."

"No. No we're not." The mage-magistrate's face went serious and professional again, to Sapphiria's disappointment.

Damn it, she needed to get it together! The last thing she wanted was the squishies looking up to her as some kind of mythical savior figure. Hell, she'd been terrified by that the first time she'd met Kalia, what the hell was wrong with her?

"The Bane have retreated in the pass and begun fortifying it." Continued the mage-magistrate. "They're using the reinforcements they got and the tools they recovered from the group at Myrtran to erect defenses."

"That's...good. If they're busy digging in, it means they can't, or won't, attack." Which was a huge relief.

"You said you wanted to push them out, that'll make it impossible. Hell, I don't even know if the rolling fortress will make any impact."

Sapphiria smiled.

"On the contrary. It'll make it easier."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"First and foremost, them hunkering down in the pass makes them far easier to defend from. A chokepoint works both ways." She was already running numbers and making plans. She could move her turrets forward, make some more, and back them up with a few contingents of bots. Of course 'chokepoint' was relative, depending on where in the pass they were defending, and they would almost certainly prevent her from setting up shop too close to the pass itself, but a string of sentry guns would already prevent any surprise attack, and a single position with mortars or any kind of artillery could force any sortie to attack them or get shredded by the time it got out of range. "And believe me when I tell you that whatever fortifications they make won't be enough."

The only thing that would be 'enough' would be a reinforced trench network backed up with concrete and steel bunkers. There was no way she was assaulting this place without pummeling it into rubble first, and making a siege howitzer wasn't rocket science. If Napoleon's engineers could make a twelve pounder with squishy brains, engineering and nothing more complex than an abbacus, pencils and some paper, she sure as shit could.

Though she was going far higher in terms of shell weight of course.

"I've seen too much of your accomplishments to doubt your word on that. Still, I really hope you know what you're doing. I've seen what it takes to overwhelm fortifications."

"Were you in the military?"

Kalia chuckled.

"Every mage in the magistracy has to go through military service. It's a mandatory part of getting your license, and the army pays for some of your training. It's how...well, it's how we came to rule half the continent to begin with."

"Right. I didn't know that. You'll need to show me some maps at one point."

"I'd be happy to. Malry and her brother can talk your ears off about whatever questions you may have on them too. Now, if you wish?"

"Let's finish our meal first."

And spend a few more minutes alone with her, though the AI wouldn't admit it to anyone.