Chapter 344 - The Taller They Are...

Note : This chapter probably will be the end of this streak. Sorry guys.

Chapter 344

Red Sands Desert, Archduchy of Rebirth

Dungeon Factory, Command Center

Alexandra hummed as she leaned back into her command seat, going through the files.

Glitch may be compiling all of their intelligence, from an impressive number of sources, though most of the up to date intel that didn't come from her was mostly from her UDC allies, but she still needed to actually go through the stuff. An AI could have functionally infinite databanks but even if they had access to that information it didn't necessarily mean they 'knew' it like a human did. Kind of like a difference between RAM and disc data, both were accessible but only one was readily at hand.

And since Emilia wanted her to take breaks, well, she could 'take' one while metaphorically leafing through a ton of background information.

In this case, the Eris Empire. Territorial extent, political situation, military capabilities...

Anything and everything she could find. With one notable exception.

Her enquiries into the Eris Empire had more or less completely bypassed the Imperial family. Unless she was seriously mistaken, they'd be nothing but figureheads, if not outright eradicated, in the civil war to come, and she already had Allya. She didn't even know who the current ruler of the Empire was even, since they were very unlikely to stay alive for very long.

No, what interested her were the political and economic realities the empire built upon, not its leaders. She wanted psychohistorical data she could draw inevitabilities from. The people at the helm, she'd deal with once they'd drawn themselves out from the fray after the Empire had imploded.

One thing that Alexandra had found interesting had been the Eris Empire's Protectorates. Delving a bit into their structure and reasons to be had been utterly fascinating, and a clear area of focus since when the Empire began to implode it would start by shedding its outer territories in an effort to consolidate its military around its core territories. It was an effort that was likely to fail, but it was also the only one that had any chance of succeeding.

The simple answer most people accepted was that the Empire had taken those regions for their natural resources and geographical advantages, mainly for economic reasons, and there was probably a great deal of truth to that.

What Alexandra had found, delving into Emilia and New Raleigh's texts, as well as asking a few questions to her dungeon allies within the region to shed light on some dark spots, was that the Empire's primary reasons for taking this zone was their inhabitants.

By and large the people of the Protectorates were second class citizen to the Empire, and only lip service was given to their supposed equality...except for their best and brightest. Those had the red carpet rolled out and offered full Imperial citizenship, and the one thing that was never underfunded in the Protectorates, no matter how unstable or corrupt they were, was their education system.

The Empire was doing an industrialized, government sponsored brain drain of its outer territories to feed its core regions...something that she knew most people had missed because they hadn't helped run something similar.

She had seen the signs however. It was called the Durandal Hypothesis, after a brilliant -if probably insane- shipboard AI for one of the first wave Colonization ships, the Marathon. And it was the hypothesis that the European Federation's interstellar colonies' technological and industrial capabilities had been carefully calibrated to prevent effective medium term autonomy from Earth while enabling a high enough population and tech base to...well, to produce a lot of very bright people that could then be leeched off for the Federation back home.

It was also the main purpose of the Colonial Courier Fleet, a vast array of cargo ships with top of the line hyperdrives the Federation used to keep its many colonies supplied...and bring back the ever so important students that would then fuel the Federation's infinite appetite for engineers, scientists and pretty much everyone you were always short of in a high tech economy. Brain drain on an interstellar scale.

The reason why Alpha Centauri had been so important was because it was close enough to Earth it could be used to create a fully integrated colony that could serve as a full extension of the homeworld. The strategic plan, she knew, had been to slowly expand that number of 'inner colonies' as hyperdrive technology improved, by absorbing the outer ones, creating a self sustaining expansion outwards that would enable the European Federation to simply crush or absorb all other interstellar powers in the long term.

And according to Ghost, Arcadia had, well, run the simulations whose results she could see with the Eris Empire.

Medium term, it would work. It had worked. For over five decades since the official announcement of the discovery of hyperspace, the Federation had been the single most stable and prosperous nation in terms of interstellar colonies. The UIS, even after the loss of Mars, still had the edge when it came to colonies inside Sol itself, and obviously a massive one on humanity's homeworld, with their massively greater territorial extent.

But Arcadia's predictions all ended up in the same way the Eris Empire had. Overextended military, and a 'brain drain' operation whose extension of the inner core slowed and eventually halted altogether due to increasing population densities as technology enabled them, and a growth of the outer territories to a point that they became a challenger to the inner regions...without the carrot of eventually becoming part of the core. A sort of dying American Dream, in a way.

Because part of the reason the carrot existed was that any interstellar colony or, in this case, protectorate, that grew large and powerful enough to become a candidate for the core also became a challenger and potential threat to said core. Meaning it must become part of it so its power could be used to prop it up and not chip it down.

Not doing so would inevitably lead to the openly second class 'outer' colonies being more or less being held by force and blatant economic pressure, at which point you were one step away from something similar to the absolute clusterfuck that had been the collapse of the old European colonial empires.

Except even a crippled tech base allowed you to make nuclear warheads and ships capable of using them.

Once you had that data...you realized that Earth's Orbital Defense Grid had never been intended to intercept some insane, 'kill everything' assault by one of the major powers. Ghost's explanation on the Federation's 'Final Contingency' made clear that said major powers could pierce that defensive network if they wished it. And when the Outer System Republic had most of the Arcstar attack nullified by it...it had served its exact, intended purpose.

Which begged the question...what was the Empire's defense grid? What was, push came to shove, supposed to defend the Core from its Protectorates?

And more importantly...what were the failsafes?

Because the more she looked at it, the more she was starting to read between the lines and realize none of the Final Contingency cruisers and their Armageddon planetbuster missiles were meant to actually be pointed at Earth. Mars had proven that not just the homeworld could build an Orbital Defense Grid after all.

They were there to burn the entirety of the interstellar colonies to cinders to protect the homeworld, push came to shove. Destroy over fifty worlds to save one.

She...was starting to understand why Arcadia and Ghost has serious issues with the program, and taken steps of their own to form a mutually assured destruction scenario. Even if it had been high treason every step of the way.

Alexandra sighed as she heard the small beep of the alarm going off. Alright, break time over. And it had been sufficiently long that she could probably call CQ again to check up on her and her raiding party without seeming too overbearing and fussy...hopefully.

As much as she decried Emilia for being such, she had to admit she had a tendency to fall into the same trappings. Though she sure as hell wasn't going to admit it to anyone!

*****

"Brigadier, sir." Said the Captain as he entered the room.

The old fortress of the Kaidani dukes had long predated the creation of the duchy of Kaidan, a few centuries ago, when the archduchies of Sunrise and Asaria had been dissolved. But it was, interestingly enough, a structure that had not been built by the Sapphire Kingdom, unlike most of the ducal holds. It was Asarian, from top to bottom.

The brigadier looked up from the fireplace he was busy stoking.

"Hello captain. Any news?"

"We have finished construction of the new barracks with the work parties. We should be able to house everyone now."

"Good." The brigadier smiled. "Very good."

He'd been in the city of Kaidan for a while now, though he had spent a lot of that time between life and death after the guerilla attack. In that time his most loyal officers had managed to keep everything together despite the pressure from the Duchess, and begun putting the remaining slaves in the army, as well as those they'd found along the way or in the garrison itself, to work.

Kaidan had been a wreck when they'd arrived. Under reconstruction, yes, but with the constant attacks...you could see abandoned construction projects all around the city. It was still a city, though, as thanks to the dungeon underneath there was a steady stream of mana and adventurers, but there was no hiding the damage.

The slaves had built great halls for housing not the regular troops, but themselves. The pace had also been extremely relaxed compared to what could have been expected too. Now they were just done building barracks for his men, and with the projects to repair the aqueducts and finish fixing the roads, they could finally bring the city and nearby lands to a semblance of the life it used to have.

And the constant attacks had abated. Not stopped entirely, but...slowed. They were also much better targeted and less murderous. His patrols no longer turned up without a single slave with the regulars impaled or on a smoldering pyre. Now the regulars either had their throats cut or were beaten senseless and left in the path of another patrol to find. In return, his men were trying to show the guerillas similar restraint, and the situation had been deescalating slowly. No one was even about to suggest they stop trying to kill each other, but at least they weren't being soulless monsters about it anymore.

The fact that not a single person had been enslaved since he'd arrived was helping as well. The population that had gone for the hills was slowly trickling back in, and his soldiers had been carefully instructed not to ask questions.

All of those measures of course made some of his less than loyal officers and the duchess herself froth at the mouth, but that problem had become...lesser lately. There'd been great unease among his people as the dungeon core's army had fallen back after the battle of the bridge. But there had been rumors of the damage the duchess' forces had taken. Still, those loyal to her insisted that she had not been able to bring her whole force to bear, only a tiny fraction of her troops, and surely she would come to demand explanations once she was done crushing the loyalists.

Then...the battle of the woods. Another 'great victory' where the combined might of the UDC and the entire northern army had failed miserably against a force a twentieth their size and taken catastrophic losses in the process. No matter how much they tried to pretend that the battle hadn't been a disaster, the fact they had failed to bring the dungeon core to heel or taken so long to get moving again said more than any official casualty report could.

The number of nobles that had died in both battles was also starting to unsettle some, especially since a great deal many couldn't be separated and resurrected in time among the piles of shredded corpses, and a fair few of those with blue blood in the army who had questioned his leadership were quietly switching sides or snitching on their fellows.

Of course, his measures were only the tip of the iceberg, and the just the beginning of what he needed to do if he wished to not be nailed to a wall or burning pyre at the end of this disastrous war.

But it was a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the first of many.