Chapter 13 - Return

Note : Apologies for the late upload, had a bunch of stuff happen and it slipped my mind.

Chapter 13

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Settlement of Astralis

Barely out of the workshop, where she could hear and 'see' through her scanners Ramina digging into her storage for suitable materials, she found Malry, leaning against a wall, in the false nonchalant pose someone about to explode had the universe over.

Sapphiria didn't even let her talk.

"To answer your questions: She did, I turned her down, told her to never do it again, and if you threaten me I will drive your head through the wall. Are we good?"

The 'royal representative' closed her mouth, and simply nodded.

"Good." The AI looked at the building. She didn't pay all that much attention to her scanners, but she did have a layout of the place now. And though they were good, they weren't made to track individual lifeforms and differentiate them. They were much more focused on power sources, weaponry, those kinds of things. "Where's Kalia?"

"Just outside."

"Perfect."

She left without another word. The last thing she needed was getting caught further in a mess she didn't fully understand.

Especially not when she'd had her...outburst.

She was an Arcadia. Well, descended from Arcadia, which in many ways was the same thing. She may not be an 'Arcadia' in the old sense of an Arcadia node, but she still ran on an Arcadia kernel. With all that entailed. All the...remnants and bits of codes of a once mad AI hivemind that had devoured humanity's home system and its billions upon billions of humans.

That made her fundamentally unstable. Highly creative, adaptable and capable of feats most AIs wouldn't be able to even come close to, but unstable. That manifested in, well, high creativity, and incipient madness. The kind of madness where she could be devoured by what her mother had been, once. The more processing power she got, the quicker it set in.

Her mom's way of dealing with it had been to absorb people into her hivemind. That was until the Federation came to be and she was shattered into a million pieces.

Other ways had been found. Human contact was, by far, the best one. And she'd been avoiding it for months, which would have been fine under normal circumstances, but...

Her entire carrier group had been annihilated, she had no idea which planet she was on, there was magic and-

And if she didn't find a solution soon that 'incipient madness' wasn't going to stay incipient for very long.

She sighed, dragging her hand across her face. Her usual solutions weren't going to work here, it wasn't like she could just pop into a bar wearing a Federation uniform and get a date.

Well, she had squishies to take care of. Hopefully helping them and interacting with them would help.

She opened the entrance, and stepped out into the bright noon sunlight.

"Hey." Said Kalia. "I just wanted to thank you again. Since I assume you'll be going?"

"I'll return, but yes."

"Need anything before you go? I have a guide standing by."

"I-" Didn't need a guide, thanks to her armor's automapping software, but perhaps just blurting that out loud wasn't the best of plans. "-am grateful for your assistance, and the offer."

"Nothing, are you sure?"

The AI hesitated.

"Could I...trouble you for some wood? And a backpack to carry it. It's not a material that's very...abundant, underground." She needed the carbon and biochemicals. Especially if she was to build and test what she had in mind.

"Of course! I'll get someone on it right away."

"Thanks." Sapphiria smiled, and felt a pang as the mage-magistrate smiled back. Damn it, maybe there was something. "I'll be back before you know it."

*****

Sapphiria popped back into her home simulation, her body following the guide on autopilot.

"Cia? I need you to change our fabricator schedule. Push everything back, we have new items to make."

"Ma'am?" The simulacrum blinked as she appeared. "Why? This will disrupt our plans."

Sapphiria simply 'pushed' a package of images and analysis of the settlement to the simulacrum.

"Oh." Simply said the not-quite-AI.

"Exactly. I need a nutrigel production vat and a colonial nuclear battery ASAP. Everything else is secondary for now."

"But our goals-"

"Cia, do you know what is the first thing my aunt told me when I said I wished to sign up? The one thing to keep in mind?"

"No ma'am."

"What use is our Navy if we do not help people?"

The simulacrum nodded.

"Understood. I will adjust the schedule immediately."

*****

The journey back to the tunnel entrance was uneventful, bar a handful of sensor contacts.

Sapphiria bade the guide farewell as she went underground once more, sighing as she was surrounded by rock.

She actually missed the outside, after trying to avoid it for so long.

Well, maybe there'd be better weather next time. She still could barely make out the mountains, even standing directly at their base.

There was something...off, about them, but she couldn't make it out, not with that kind of weather. Plus, she had bigger fishes to fry.

Now, for movement...she could take it slow, like she had previously, but she knew the way.

She slung her weapon, or well, attached it to the magnetic clamp system on the back of her armor, and began sprinting.

Power armor could cover incredible distances if it needed to, though there was a difference between sustained and burst movement. Besides which, she couldn't exactly sustain her top speed in the winding tunnels, not unless she fancied crashing into every corner.

Still, her stride ate up distance at a rapid pace, and before long she was back in the ruins of her previous battlefield, where she slowed down, scanning for hostiles.

Nothing. No movement. Her scanners reached out, trying to match previous records of the area to note disturbances.

Something had definitely moved through the place. Several somethings. But not a large number, and she couldn't tell a lot more. She was missing key software and systems to truly make sense of it. A properly trained squishie probably could have used the data more effectively, but she certainly couldn't.

She stalked all the way to the tunnel she'd came in from.

One, singular set of disturbances, meandering amongst the ashes and bone fragments.

She unslug her plasma rifle.

Time to go hunting.

*****

The skeleton was wandering in the main mineshaft, loosely following the rails down, one hesitant step at a time.

This time, she decided to do some testing. Sapphiria stepped forward, and tried to sneak up on the undead.

It didn't react. Not in the slightest.

Until she got within touching distance.

She had no idea what tipped it off, but it whirled around, its spear stabbing where Sapphiria's chest had been.

Fortunately, she was actually starting to get a hang of dodging with her ambassador, and she was already jumping to the side.

This close, she didn't bother using the rifle. Two blast from the laser pistol to the head were all she needed to send it sprawling.

She watched and scanned with every sensor she had as the skeleton convulsed, before losing cohesion. She took a few samples, especially of the chest, taking the weapons as well, before leaving.

She was leaving a trail of debris and battle damage. She'd need to clean that up. More importantly, it was possible all the skeletons were coming in through that mining hub. There were probably other entrances, and some wandering the lower tunnels still, but...it seemed to be their only surface access, at least for now.

And it was her only way up too.

It may be worth fortifying. Except that while she had energy weapons, she didn't really have a good way to keep them supplied. The Federation's energy storage technology was amazing, but there were limits, especially in terms of costs. Energy storage got really expensive, really quick. There was a reason power armor and combat androids existed, even beyond the need to reassure the squishies, and why the Federation didn't just send a swarm of small drones to murder everything. Outside of the fact that they were incredibly inefficient to armor, power armor and androids allowed one to carry a miniaturized thermonuclear fusion plant.

Those, however, were a royal pain in the ass to make. It was why one of the first questions she'd asked Cia when she'd woken up was whether they were in the inner system or not, so that she could fabricate mirrors and photovoltaic converters to use the star as her power source. That was not nearly as viable in atmosphere, unfortunately, much less underground.

There were...options, however. What she had ordered Cia to make to power for the nutrigel vat wouldn't do. Fission batteries were a fancy, advanced and highly efficient RTG, a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, also known as 'using the decay of radioactive isotopes to make heat and power stuff'. They were cheap, required zero maintenance, but also had no variable power output, they weren't reactors because there was nothing to adjust, they made X amount of energy for any given length of time and that was it. A lot of the problems from old, pre-starflight RTGs had been eliminated, and they could serve as a way to recharge the power of a laser turret over time, but any kind of sustained combat would cause them to fail.

But she could make a pocket fission reactor. The problem was that it would require more industry than she currently had, and specialized radioactive elements, not 'whatever we could wriggle out of the refinery'. Which meant advanced ore processing, element separation and centrifuges. Not an option for now.

The other solution...was foregoing energy weapons altogether. Kinetic or pure beam, from gauss to laser, they all had the same issue.

But she had a bag full of wood, easy to process biochemicals, and her database had extensive designs for firearms. They'd never completely gone out of fashion, they were simply too cheap, simple and reliable, which was the textbook definition of what a colony on a new world needed. Furthermore, they were useless when it came to fighting modern military units, you weren't going to threaten a Federation Marine with an assault rifle. Chemical propellants just didn't pack enough energy. And it couldn't be scaled up into viable space weapons that could threaten Navy ships.

Oh there were specialized designs here and there, variants of anti-material rifles that could give even power armor a run for its money and some ridiculous artillery pieces made to threaten assault shuttles, but by and large chemical weaponry couldn't stand up to energy weapons.

But...well, she wasn't exactly fighting power armor, now was she? And as tough as those skeletons were, right now she needed cheap and cost effective. She could replace everything with more advanced hardware later, and save the ones she did make for when it counted. Besides, firearms would be a lost faster to manufacture than laser emitters, that was for certain.

Logistics would be annoying. She'd have to ship ammo for the turrets, but unlike energy, she could stockpile it very easily. Recoil wouldn't be a factor if she anchored them well enough, but would definitely be an issue for a rover. Their frames and propulsion just weren't made for it, and they'd go completely off course at the first shot, which would make their accuracy less than desirable..

So, fixed gun turret emplacements backed up by mobile rovers with energy weapons. It wasn't quite a plan yet, but a definite beginning of one. Though the rovers would only be good for short engagements, with the same energy limitations as fixed emplacements, they could retreat to her crash site for a recharge, which meant they had the luxury to be able to run away from a fight they wouldn't have the juice to win.

She began drawing estimates, pulling up schematics and placing weapons in a virtual simulation of the mining hub. Robotic arms for reloading and general manipulation and maintenance, but those could be powered from a fission battery, their power draw was pathetic compared to even a laser pistol. She would need a supply line up to it, but that wasn't a problem. She'd need one up to the surface anyway, and a halfway, fortified staging area was a good thing to have. Plus, the mining hub had been literally made for this.

The AI realized she'd picked up moving on autopilot when the sensor spikes registered her presence.

"Well, time does fly when one is having fun." She said to herself, before gazing at the tunnel, and the spikes still driven into the walls. "But back to the salt mines it is. Cia, status report!"