Chapter 18 - Tactical Dispositions

Note : Chapter 360 has been written and added to the queue !

I have decided to have mercy, and hold off on posting 360 until 361 has been written, given the fact that I have made a...perfect, and utterly EVIL cliffhanger. Last one though, three in a row was unintentional.

Chapter 18

Starborn Mountains

Mining Hub

Sapphiria realized she had no idea what she was doing.

Not assembling the turret. She may have commanded a carrier group, but she knew how to use a toolkit. And yes, it was a pile of scrap but it was one she designed and she knew it inside and out.

Her problem was that she had no idea how to use it effectively. Not as in how to fire it, but...where would she set it up for optimal firing angles? To avoid them being swarmed? Enable crossfires? She was a naval officer, terrain for her meant planets and other celestial bodies, not crates, corridors and barricades!

The first thing she was regretting was that she couldn't mount the guns on the ceiling. Not only because the turret just wouldn't work upside down as she'd designed it, but also because she simply couldn't get her android up there and assemble the damned things. She'd have to make a note to shut her damned paranoia up and just bring a damned construction drone next time.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

She was starting to suspect the point of that program was to force her to step back and break up her train of thoughts.

Regardless, she had tagged the locations she thought wouldn't be terrible. Mostly it was about giving covers to her turrets -in such close quarters range was meaningless, and the Bane had proven they had weapons that could harm even molecular armor-, and denying it to the enemy. Thus she'd placed the turrets in crate clusters, turning them into makeshift forts, and she'd already started her cargo bot on reconfiguring the other ones strewn about, stacking the ones she couldn't make use of just yet against a wall, to avoid them being in the way of her lines of fire. She'd also cracked open a few of the crates, and resolved to dedicate a cargo bot to emptying what was useful. Most of it was just disintegrating supplies, which were still useful as refinery fodder if nothing else, but a handful had contained ore and one in particular was packed full of what seemed like a shipment of those anomalous mine supports. Surprisingly enough, there was a lot less ore than she would have expected, which definitely hinted that this place had been made to dig down to reach her tunnel complex, not extract raw materials. The fact that Kalia didn't seem to have the slightest idea about the latter's existence, let alone the mining complex's true purpose, begged a lot of questions.

Questions which became even more problematical when it seemed like the Bane had moved more forces to guard this place than they had thrown at Astralis, period, at least given what she'd heard. Kalia didn't realize it, since she had obliterated a solid half of the undead before reaching her, but still.

She could worry about that later however. The mining hub now looked almost like some kind of toy soldier set up, with crates forming tiny castles around the three turrets, each positioned to be able to engage at a different angle and scrape off the sides of the other forts with their guns to hold back the tide against their cohorts if they were swarmed.

Of course at that point it'd be very much a last stand, because if there were enough enemies to overwhelm three entrenched machineguns she was royally screwed.

Thankfully she had identified a tunnel she thought most of the undead had come from. It was hard to tell since they'd kicked up a lot of dust wandering in the main hub, but it seemed like some kind of secondary access shaft, probably dug up before the main vehicle access had been dug. That would explain why it was in undead territory, as it probably ended up somewhere on the other end of the pass, while the valley outposts were still being built.

She still only had a rough idea of the surrounding area, but it would make sense, given how much of a pain in the ass moving people through mountain passes were in the medieval ages according to her library data, and that wasn't counting everything else necessary to dig out a sizeable mining installation and keep it operating.

One thing she'd found interesting was the utter lack of pumps, or really any noticeable level of humidity. The entire valley was probably pretty high up already for the tunnels to not be bothered by the water table at all. Even then, the entire thing almost seemed like it was ventilated, though how and where she had no idea.

Sapphiria froze as she received a ping.

From her sensors next to the crash site.

Fuck.

She ran the numbers, and sighed.

She'd never get there in time. But that was why she'd built those defenses.

"Cia?"

"Yes ma'am?" Answered the simulacrum's disembodied voice.

"Get the drones out of the way, and power up the turret. Time to see if it works. Do have the rover on standby though." And push comes to shove, she could just ram the thing with her mining bots, who unlike the drones, had some power in their chassis.

"Affirmative."

The wait for the skeleton to meander its way in was agonizing, but she managed to pass most of it by running diagnostics on the turrets and drawing some plans for expansion of the space.

At last however, the skeleton meandered into the chamber she had crashed into-

The skeleton flew apart.

The laser turret had already been pre-targeted. They knew which tunnel the skeleton was using, and it only needed minute adjustments to lock onto it.

And unleash a flurry of laser pulses that reduced its upper half to vapor in a few seconds.

Lack of armor piercing or no, there was a reason lasers had been the king of ground warfare during the interplanetary age, before human portable railguns and gauss weaponry were perfected as Arcadia discovered the hyperdrive and humanity reached out towards the stars.

"Well. That was...successful." And a tad bit too destructive for helpful samples, not that she didn't already have her ha nds full trying to make sense of the stuff Ramina had given her. Besides which, this was the place she had to defend. As her mom said, from her endless stash of twenty first century media: there is no overkill, there is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload'. "Alright, resume normal operations. Are the vats ready?"

"Eighty seven percent complete."

Sapphiria nodded. A single nutrigel vat couldn't hope to support the whole of Astralis, though it would make a very appreciable difference. Three more would bring it to a point where they should be able to make it with scavenging, but she sure as hell wasn't going to stop there.

Of course the problem was going to be shipping three vats up top, but with the hub secure, she could run a cargo bot back and forth with a minimum escort.

"Alright. I'm heading home." She patted the turret. "I'll sweep back with the first bot, set things up with the squishies to receive the vats."

"Affirmative."

*****

To Sapphiria's surprise, the huntmarshall was still guarding the entrance as she arrived.

"Hello Tramistres." She said as she emerged from the tunnel, this time having taken care to turn off her camouflage before coming into direct view of the squishies. "I thought you'd have been rotated out."

The old woman shrugged.

"We don't exactly have people to rotate. And rotate where, exactly?" She chuckled. "Besides, leaving out in the monster infested woods, stalking and being stalked in the undergrowth?" She took in a deep lungful of air theatrically, before letting it out with a feral grin plastered on her face. "Makes me feel alive."

Sapphiria chuckled, a bit put off by that. Was the woman joking? The AI certainly hoped she was. The other humans being clearly as put off as she was wasn't encouraging however. Damn it that squishy was crazy. Scratch that, they all were. But that woman in particular.

"Right. Well, I'll leave the wood hunt to you. I've got another shipment of these bad boys to get home." She slapped the vat. "Can you handle that?"

"Sure thing! If it means getting more grub, we'll drown in volunteers."

"Good. To be honest I didn't make more...." What were the words Kalia had used? Servant golems, that wasi t."...servant golems to help carry those."

The huntmarshall chuckled.

"That's fine, no one expected you to. Kulvat!"

One of the hunters did a reasonable approximation of a salute.

"Ma'am?"

"Get home, round up a party. We need some of those 'nutrigel vats' carried through the woods."

"Yes ma'am!" The hunter sped off, and Sapphiria watched him go. She was fascinated by the way he seemed to just...vanish into the undergrowth. She still had him on scanners, but if she was entirely honest it didn't seem to be entirely natural. Not that she had much experience in such matters.

Afterwards, it was a short order to get the vats unloaded and stacked into a corner, alongside their power systems.

"I assume you'll be off?" Said the huntmarshall as she looked back at the AI, who nodded.

"Yeah." She pointed her thumb over her shoulder at the tunnel. "I've got some defenses set up down there I need to tidy up."

"Well, have a good journey back. And...Sapphiria?"

"Yes?"

The huntmarshall nodded towards the vats.

"Thank you. This...If this is as good as they said, we won't be starving this winter."

"That's the idea." The subsequent silence started to stretch into awkwardness, and she cleared her throat. "I'll be off!"

The huntmarshall nodded, and the AI quickly retreated into the tunnel. The squishie clearly didn't know how to thank her, and to be honest Sapphiria wasn't exactly certain what to do either. The usual platitudes all referred to the Federation, her status as an AI or 'for the good of humanity', and none were exactly something she could say here.

The important part was that she had defenses, and the squishies wouldn't starve in their immediate future. Now she could start focusing on scaling up a bit.

One could never have too much industry after all.

*****

"You know, sometimes I'm really glad I don't have tastebuds, or the need to eat." Said Gregor as he looked at Ramina, as the artificer was poking curiously at her bowl of nutrigel. "Legion rations were bad, but if they'd been this awful we'd have either turned into super-soldiers or overthrown the Emperor. Probably both."

Kalia chuckled. The 'council table' was as good a place as any to eat, at least once the precious maps were rolled up and removed. They could have squeezed in somewhere else, but the keep's other rooms, including what had once been an officer's mess hall, were all being used to house who and what they could, repurposed into dormitories or storing delicate equipment.

"Well, it may not be great." She took a spoonful of the nutrigel, and shoved it into her mouth, suppressing a shudder. Even with some oats and a tiny bit of honey, it was still...uncanny. "But it's filling."

"Yeah." Ramina grimaced as she took a spoonful of her own. "I did some quick calculations. With the other three she's just sent us...well, we should be able to make it."

"But she's not stopping there."

Ramina shook her head.

"I doubt she would. What worries me though is..." She trailed off, and Kalia nodded, encouraging her. "One of those vats, having it on the side, I believe. I don't think she would have more than one to give away though."

"She did say she could make more." Pointed out the mage-magistrate, and Ramina shook her head.

"That's the point! She made three more this quickly? That's...insane! Think about it. Even all the other mad things those vats can do without the arcane aside, she made the means to feed an entire settlement in a couple of days. Just like that."

"That's...when you put it this way, yeah. That is insane. Tramistres said she even deployed some defenses down in the tunnels. How much can she make?"

"Well..." Malry shrugged as everyone turned to look at her. "She did give away the vats, and a couple of golems, like it was nothing. You know, things most artificers would sell their souls for?" Ramina winced at the furious glance the herbalist threw her.

"Yeah." Gregor leaned forward, his elbows clanking on the table. "And that's with her basically being geared for experiments, research, or whatever the hell she was doing down there. What happens when she retools for war?"

The silence that followed that was deafening.