Chapter 22 - Starfire Valley

Chapter 22

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Woods

"You know you don't need to accompany me back, right? I can find my own way." Said Sapphiria as they pressed through the woods.

"You've done so much for us. It's the least I can do." Answered the mage-magistrate, before smiling. "Besides, I'm overdue for an inspection of our little...outpost."

"There isn't much to inspect."

"I know. But it's the thought that counts. My people need to know I care."

Sapphiria smiled.

"That they do." She blinked as rays of sunshine came through the canopy. The weather had cleared up at last. Maybe she wouldn't just have a sea of clouds when looking at the sky this time. That'd be...refreshing, even if she wasn't necessarily all that enamored with planets and-

Sapphiria stopped dead in her tracks as she saw the mountain.

She was no geologist but she knew the result of orbital bombardment when she saw it. She'd seen some with her own eyes after all, both at Ivarak, where she'd sent her courier before her carrier was annihilated, and at the naval academy. Mars may have less scars than Earth when it came to warfare, but it still had some, and the sprawling complex had been built in the Watney triangle, in between the three craters that formed the 'tips' of the geological formation. The south-western one, Marth, had hosted one of the strategic launch sites of the Martian Republic. The kind of launch sites staffed entirely by fanatics indoctrinated to believe that their duty was to wipe out humanity's homeworld rather than surrender.

The sixth fleet had vaporized it during the Solar Unification campaign. Then, centuries later, the Federation had used the crater to house the piloting training facility because, well, it was already so screwed crashing a shuttle in it wasn't going to do much to it.

Someone had cut the mountain in half, and glassed the side of what was left.

"Impressive, eh?" Said Kalia, as she stopped by her side. "It sure deserves its name, even if you don't believe the legends."

"Legends?"

"I suppose they wouldn't have been around back then. It's said that a great shooting star came down, broke through the mountains and crashed into the highlands beyond. There was even an Imperial expedition sent to find out if anything remained of it, as shooting stars have great magical potential, and starmetal is precious beyond measure. It's how the ley line node was discovered."

The AI swallowed. Shooting star her ass.

Someone had blown this place up from orbit, right as it was coming into view over the horizon, hence the angle. Probably sawed the entire thing from the top down as the rest of the mountain came into view. Energy blasts to ablate the rock then a high yield kinetic impactor to shatter the target underneath.

That was...an insane amount of firepower to use on a planetary target. If people remembered what had happened...no wonder they said the place used to be under perpetual ice, they were probably still recovering from a nuclear winter!

What could possibly justify-

It hit her. That nagging sense of familiarity with the chambers and corridors she'd crashed into.

Stuggart. The European Federation Planetary Defence Center her aunt had received her basic training in. The gigantic, planetbound fortresses of early starflight, meant to defend worlds against whole fleets. The early Federation had dismantled them all because without any practical way of deflecting relativistic missiles, they were sitting ducks for long range kinetic bombardment. And once those defences had come to be, well, they already had spaceborn fortresses more than good enough to do the job, without putting the squishies below in the line of fire.

She'd crashed into one. Or at least a place that was being dug out to house one.

Something told her she was standing where its completed sibling had once been. Or maybe the main installation the place she was in had been meant to expand.

She almost suffered a software crash.

Because first: Oh shit.

Second: That explained a lot.

Third: That begged a LOT more questions.

Fourth: OH SHIT.

She realized she'd completely frozen as Kalia nudged her.

"What? Oh, sorry, it's just...it's been a while."

"I can imagine." The mage-magistrate smiled, with a tinge of unease in it, and Sapphiria realized that she had frozen. Not just 'oh my android stopped moving' but 'all the background code that simulated human functions so I don't look so artificial ceased operation'.

Humans didn't notice most of it, not consciously, but Kalia's subconscious had to be screaming that the person in front of her had suddenly stopped breathing, twitching, or anything and might as well have been a statue. Which, for all intents, she had been. A fusion powered, heavily armed statue of ass kicking in a too small package.

"I've also been away from my...home for a while. I need to get back. And take some time to think." That was basically true, just not in any way that the squishie would think, and the mage-magistrate nodded in sympathy.

"Of course. My apologies for pressing you. Everything that has happened lately has to be quite the shock."

"You have...no idea."

"Probably not, no." Kalia smiled, and Sapphiria found herself smiling back.

No. Bad. She was supposed to be protecting/extracting information from/manipulating the squishies. Not...forming relationships with them.

Thankfully, Kalia took her silence as the end of the conversation, and left her alone with her thoughts.

*****

As soon as she arrived before the pod, Sapphiria had her android physically sit down. It didn't really matter, but it made her feel better.

She sighed, lowering her head, before snapping it up. She'd spent the entire way there handling mundane status reports, and putting her data in order.

It was time she stopped avoiding it. It was time she stopped reacting.

She hopped out of the android, and Cia watched as the AI started throwing up datapoints in their shared simulation, hovering above the table.

"Alright. So first things first. That anomaly." Sapphiria threw up the recordings of the...thing they'd encountered. "Planetary level mass, no gravity field. Remnants?" She glanced at Cia, who shrugged helplessly.

Remnants was the name the Federation had given to some anomalies it couldn't explain.

Like, say, the fact that a few ships having misjumped in the outer rim had stumbled upon debris fields, deep in interstellar space. Debris that, as far as they could tell, had been some kind of computer array.

They were impossible to date. Whatever had taken them out had bathed them in radiation and exotic particles in ways the Federation didn't fully understand.

Most of the other anomalies were some things that didn't gel with stellar mapping predictions. As in 'all our simulations say there should be a star system here and it's just not'. Including one, problematical detail.

Some deep space research platforms had noted an anomaly over the century humanity had been pushing into the galactic core, about the milky way's central black hole. As in 'some of its energy output and gravitational footprint is missing'.

And the computer network debris they'd found had no power source they could detect.

It hadn't taken long for people to put two and two together. There were even wild theories that one could, in theory, explain the missing matter and energy from the equations that underpinned realspace physics. That 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' may be that destroyed computer network, and whatever was draining the center of the galaxy to power it.

That wasn't possible. Dark energy was sixty eight percent of the energy in the universe, according to simulation models. That much energy couldn't come from black holes, however large. And the computer network would have to outmass the rest of the universe by a factor of five to one to explain dark matter.

That wasn't mentioning that two areas had anomalous hyperspace density and travel, and those were the galactic core and the outer rim.

Finally, Cia spoke up.

"Analysis of Remnant systems indicate...normal technology?"

Sapphiria grunted. They knew the debris were from computer networks because they had plenty of experience with violently destroyed molecular circuitry. It came with the territory of having your government and most of your military run by AIs, plus sharing the galaxy with a psychotic anti-automation Theocracy.

Hell. Deep analysis of the debris said it wasn't particularly good molecular circuitry. Stuff like that wasn't good, it was...cheap. Cost effective.

It wasn't space magic, or physical impossibilities though.

She filed that aside for now. She knew she most likely wasn't going to solve it.

"So. Remnants or not, we got transported in this system." Presumably. She hadn't actually checked the star configuration against what she'd recorded after appearing here. It amazed her how much her systems would log in the background on her carrier. "Then were fired upon. The weapons..." She winced. "Let's say magic for now. The fortress was positioned too perfectly. No other nearby fortifications. So specifically guarding the exit? Maybe it shredded a colony ship, and the squishies crashlanded here. But then...bombarded back to the stone age, maybe?" Not that it made much sense. The level of destruction required to wipe out most but not all the memory of what had happened -something had survived, given the name of the valley and the 'legends' surrounding it- was massive, and they wouldn't have gotten back up in time.

Not for a terran colony ship anyway.

"Possibility: Fortresses emplaced after bombardment. Containment measure?"

"Oh." That...was a good point, actually. Colony ship comes through, lands, makes the planet its home. Something comes to investigate what's making all the noise. A war ensues, the other side wins, parks fortresses to prevent more incoming but either refuses to just murder everybody or misses a few humans on the surface. "An excellent hypothesis."

"Thank you ma'am."

"Either way...some memory of what happened remains. Perhaps even technology? It's hard to tell with magic, but they recognized my armor and gun. Well, Ramina did. That...or they tried reproducing and mimicking advanced technology with alternative means with the destruction of their industrial base." If there was one thing one would be certain to bomb from orbit, it was the factories, at the bare minimum. If you were willing to nuke a world from orbit at all, anything resembling an industrial complex was getting flattened. Civilian industries could be repurposed for war frighteningly quickly, exhibit A: the Federation getting attacked by the Theocracy and turning a consumer economy meant for pampering squishies into the most powerful military force the galaxy had ever seen.

Then proceeding to go back to pampering the squishies while violently murdering anything that looked at them funny.

Cia tilted her head.

"Timing?"

"I know. There's either a temporal element we're not getting or...or the colony ship wasn't from Earth." Sapphiria bit her lower lip. Temporal distortion was possible, it was the entire point of relativity, but the parameters were all wrong. Maybe this place ran on a whole different timescale? That was too complicated. And not something she could test for anyway. "What we do know is that someone had technology." She had her android knock on the ground. "Laser smoothing, the means to make Planetary Defence Centers, the works. So, twenty first century tech at the very least. Very little publicly remains of the knowledge of what happens, but some know. Like those that ordered the mine dug to here. Maybe they were trying to recover tech? And then tripped some defense system."

"Or an enemy booby trap."

Sapphiria opened her mouth, then closed it.

Fuck. That was right. Whatever had blasted the valley into existence probably had the sensors to see that someone had been planning to make a new PDC here.

Plant some booby trap in case survivors tried to do it again, or recover something...

Oh she didn't like that idea. Not one bit.

Even the Theocracy hadn't been this vicious. Then again, the Theocracy had fully intended to someday inhabit the planets they bombed, even those they glassed. They didn't want to leave booby traps their colonists would have to deal with later, even if they were their 'servant' species, also known as 'disposable genetically engineered slave labor'.

So the real questions were: was something coming after her carrier group and that merry band of raiders had been annihilated?

She threw the ideas into the air. A response, maybe from-

"Rescue."

Sapphiria blinked, and looked at the simulacrum, who shrugged.

"What rescue?"

"Ours."

"We're rescuing the squishies already, what-" She stopped as she saw the not-quite-AI's incredulous stare. "Oh. Us."

Right. She wasn't alone in this.

She had the entire Navy behind her. A Navy that was going to flip its shit after seemingly losing one of its latest carrier to a group of raiders.

And, incidentally, the daughter of the President. A President renowned for being overprotective and vengeful to the point of psychosis.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.