Chapter 32 - The Hand

Note : So, I really wasn't happy with how this chapter came out, and rewrote its ending. Don't hesitate to tell me what you think of it ! Overall, I actually like what I ended up with now.

Also, my PC is dying, hurray ! Unless I can fix it, I'll have to find a new one. Wonderful.

Chapter 32

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Crash Site

Sapphiria grimaced as she threw away the schematics, causing them to float off in the simulation.

"Damn it. No, not good enough! We need something better."

"There are no better heating systems in our database." Said Cia, a bit testily.

"They're entropy machines! How are they so, so..."

"Inefficient? They are not. Any electric heater is, by definition, a hundred percent efficient. However we have limited power options."

Sapphiria gritted her teeth, and nodded.

"Yeah. Colonial nuclear batteries aren't going to cut it. They're-" She stopped. "Wait. The batteries. Are they...modular? Can components be removed and added?"

"Most colonial devices are, for maintenance and ease of use. Why?" The simulacrum blinked as she realized what her AI was thinking. "No! Ma'am, the safety implications-"

"They're already using them, what's the harm?"

"You would be stripping down the shielding!" Said the simulacrum. "Ma'am, this is ill-advised."

"It's either that or having the squishies die in the cold. Do you have a better idea?" The simulacrum stared at her, but said nothing. "No? Then let's make one, and start experimenting."

*****

There was no sound, except for that of an ancient coin clicking on even older bones.

Click click click click, stop, then repeat. Back and forth across the Hand's bony fingers.

That coin bore the visage of an Emperor. Long gone, long forgotten...except for those who had served them. In life, in death, and beyond.

"So, there is something else to this." No one in the tent answered. No one could. Only soulless served in this forsaken valley. "I feel it in the air. I can almost taste it. Something...foreign." The Hand stood up. "Gather the third maniple. We march now."

One of the legionnaires saluted, a bone fist crashing against an ancient bronze chest plate, and exited the tent, and the Hand stood up, and calmly gathered artifacts from an open chest.

Sometimes, a campaign required a...personal touch.

It was why the Dominions had Hands to serve their will, just like they served the Throne's.

*****

"See? Not so bad, isn't it?" Said Sapphiria as she stepped back from the stripped down nuclear battery.

Cia's expression was dubious at best, but she nodded.

"Radiation levels are...acceptable."

"I didn't remove any of the inner core shielding, so it should be." The AI smiled. "And if it's too much heat?" She grabbed a heat conversion ring, and slotted it in. "Bam. Heat output lowers. Electricity output goes up."

"Which has to be used."

"There's failsafes for that. But push comes to shove we can just wire them to a normal heater to waste it in the air or something. Not that I expect it to be much of an issue, given what they're living in, I don't expect 'too much heat' to be a problem for the foreseeable future." The AI stretched. There was no need to, strictly speaking, but it felt good to do so anyway. "Alright. Did we start the concrete deliveries?"

"Affirmative, but only a small fraction of the output can be brought to the surface."

"That's alright. We need some of it here." Sapphiria winced as she saw Cia's expression. "Yes?"

The simulacrum gestured, and Sapphiria blinked as colonial schematics popped up in the air.

The AI sighed.

"I know, I know." She gazed at the colony domes, the prefabricated housing buildings, and all manners of keeping squishies safe and comfortable on alien worlds. "But first, we don't have the capacity for that. Even if we diverted all our production towards them, they wouldn't be ready in time. Certainly not for the entire population. Besides..." She sighed. "I don't think they'd be ready to accept that much. Not yet."

"Their buildings-"

"Are an insult to the concept of construction, I am aware. But they're the best they can do right now. And as much as I hate to admit it, we can't do everything for them. Not when we're still scaling up. We work with them, then we will be able to work for them." Not that squishies liked to be reminded that AIs did the heavy lifting, however true it was. "Do you understand?" The simulacrum nodded. "Good. Now, I believe you sent the bots to start excavating some mineral veins, right?"

"Affirmative. Iron, primarily."

"I'll do an inspection tour. See how it's working out. Maybe optimize some things."

"It would be helpful. Remote control is not possible at those distances."

"I am well aware of that. Alright, I'll take a look." She pulled up a map, and began moving out of the cavern where she held her experiments. "Oh, and do prepare the cargo bot to take our prototype topside. I'm sure Kalia will want to have a look at it!"

"Of course ma'am. It will be done."

"Excellent." And with that she was off, though at a more sedate pace than usual. The testing room and its hallways may be empty, but the crash site was getting rather crowded, at least around her pod. The cavern she was in was huge, well, had been before her pod brought half of it down, but so was a lot of the machinery she was making. She might need to think about expanding soon.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

She smiled, and out of curiosity, checked the list, before wincing and closing it.

Right. Better let Cia deal with that. Too demoralizing otherwise. Maybe someday she'd take items off faster than she put new ones in, but today wasn't that day.

*****

"Well, that was a waste of a trip." Said Sapphiria as she looked at the bot, happily dumping its payload of mined ore into a pile for a cargo bot to scoop up.

"It is their designed purpose." Answered the simulacrum.

The AI nodded. Her mining drones were made to chew apart asteroids, and not only needed a nigh constant link with her but also considerably babysitting for anything not asteroid related. It was getting so bad she was seriously considering recycling them, the only things holding her back was the fact that they were so advanced, and it would cost her a fair amount of fabricator time for very little benefit.

The bots on the other hand? They were made for this kind of mining. Basically pointed at a deposit by a squishie and told 'mine it'. They required some supervision, but that was mostly a matter of environmental problems. Like fauna trying to chew on them.

Plus they were optimized for planetary extraction. Following an ore vein and scraping out every last bit was their entire point. She'd checked every site on her way up -this one was in the old mining shaft, actually, you could still see the traces on the ground where she'd stolen the minecart rails-, and there had been no issue.

Truth be told, the only problem was that it required a lot of cargo bots compared to the mining being done, but the ore made up for that, and she had the bots to spare after she'd setup the minecart systems. Actually...

"We could draw up a new minecart system. All the way to the mining hub, perhaps." She smiled. "Maybe take some rails from other tunnels and replace the ones we took here."

The simulacrum nodded.

"That should be possible. The current mining operations do not require anywhere such infrastructure however."

"I'm thinking ahead." She really needed to start to. "We're going to need some significant expansion, and I-"

She was interrupted by an alert from the turrets.

"Mining hub defenses engaging hostiles." Helpfully said Cia.

"I noticed. Wha-Holy crap!"

One of the turrets threw up an emergency code and winked out.

The AI and simulacrum exchanged a look, as the distant sound of gunfire finally reached her android's position.

Sapphiria took off sprinting, calling up her junkbots, as Cia pulled the mining bots back and cleared the fabricator schedule, focusing on bringing the last of the repairs to completion.

The Bane were back, and with a vengeance.

*****

Sapphiria sprinted out of the tunnel and straight into hell.

Two of her machinegun turrets were still firing, but the shotgun turrets weren't. One of them looked like a javelin pincushion, the one closest to the tunnel, two others had been set alight and half melted, while the fourth and last one was just gone, nothing but a scorch mark and bits of crates where it had once stood.

The wall where she'd stacked up the crates had caught on fire, and the entire space was lit with the flickering flames, which only added to the chaos.

She downloaded the logs from the turrets, now that she was close enough, as she dove into cover and started to assess the situation.

According to the data, the enemy had started with a rush attack. A wave of regular skeletons, followed almost immediately by legionnaires, who had proceeded to destroy the first turret. But the machineguns had hammered their armor into scrap before they could do much more.

Then things got...confusing. There had been another wave, but her turrets had thrown error codes and refused to engage half of it. Wait, no. Not refused, regarded them as invalid targets. Because...

Because they didn't have anything beyond visual signatures. They'd been illusions, holograms. The second wave was a very different affair to the first though. Shield bearing, well, legionnaires almost like the romans had, not the byzantian looking things Kalia had called by that name. With large shields that somehow deflected incoming fire. Well, not all of it, especially from the machineguns, but enough for them to actually be standing their ground.

The shield bearers had provided cover for their archers to take out one of the machineguns and two of the shotguns, but there was no record of what had vaporized the last shotgun sentry. It was just...there one second, and gone the next.

She retargeted the turrets, and waited.

The archers moved to fire again, forced to expose themselves, as arcing their shots would only hit the ceiling, and the machineguns ripped them to pieces. She saw the pause on the other side, and she swore. They had something on the other side adapting. She needed to find it and-

And that thought died as the shield wall split apart, revealing a figure, clad in magnificent hooded robes and what would have looked like ceremonial armor over them if it wasn't spewing exotic radiation.

The figure gestured, a skeletal hand coming out of a purple and gold sleeve, and one of her two remaining machineguns exploded.

Oh. That's what had done it.

She quickly reviewed the sensor data. Thermal and kinetic blast. Kind of like those old infrared guns used during the interplanetary wars.

Well, she had some thermal blasts of her own.

She ran out of cover, and opened fire with her plasma gun, on maximum power.

The creature -it had to be the Hand-, reacted like a viper, immediately towards her, and gesturing as the plasma blast screamed towards them.

They'd been waiting for that.

Fuck.

A wave of...something came to meet the bolt of ravenous energy.

And exploded.

The front rank of shield bearers was just vaporized as the bolt became a plasma bomb, just like with the legionnaire.

The Hand was thrown back, a bubble of scintillating energy appearing around them to protect them from the detonation. Energy shields? That was...

Impossible, but so was everything else happening here.

The Hand came back up, and Sapphiria had to stifle a gasp.

Their hood had been thrown back, and she saw an androgynous visage, so perfect and pale it might have been sculpted out of porcelain. Except for the eyes. The eyes were a deep crimson, and there was something old in them. Something she'd only seen in her aunt's eyes.

A monster, chained deep within, screaming to get free.

The Hand gazed at her, and nodded, slowly, as if they had just gotten the answer to a slightly interesting riddle, and not just been fired at with a weapon capable of vaporizing battle tanks.

The turret's gunfire passed over them, and they did not even blink as the bullets ricoched off of the glowing energy shield, though Sapphiria did note that the light shifted, changed...and dimmed. Not perceptible for a human, but certainly for her.

The Hand waved imperiously with their skeletal arm, and walked out of the room, the remaining undead reforming a shield wall and retreating in perfect lockstep, marching back into the tunnel they had come from.

Sapphiria stared as they went, her plasma gun pinging her that it had recharged a second after the last of the undead vanished.

"What. The. Fuck." She said out loud, though only inside of her helmet.