Chapter 190 - New Lead

Chapter 190

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

Dungeon Factory, Command Center

"Bingo." Muttered Alexandra as she gazed at the footage.

Looked like the baroness had been right on the money about the pirate captain being in bed with the local insurgency.

Then she saw the second part tagged absolute emergency, and let go of her mug, letting it crash onto the floor as she saw the spider golem try to follow them into a building…and its camouflage and communication systems failed. The comm dissolved into static, and the stealth coating briefly went insane, going all the colors of the rainbow like a mad screen, before shutting down entirely. Thankfully, Alexandra was both paranoid and thorough, so emergency protocols took hold and it immediately retreated, its systems returning to normal once it pulled back.

Holy. Shit.

Scratch working for the insurrection. She'd thought Allya's assertions that everything about the captain fit too neatly were too paranoid, even by her standards.

Now she realized she owed the baroness an excuse.

She knew that they weren't inquisitors. Not only did they not seem to bother with that level of subtlety, but they'd also failed to demonstrate similar anti-stealth tech during their visit. Otherwise they would have almost certainly nailed her stealth golems during the raid on the Void Blades.

Which left only one force that she knew of that had a tendency for secrecy, and access to tech beyond her wildest dreams.

The Order.

She ordered her troops to mobilize, as she sent messengers to ask the baroness for a meeting.

Looked like she had her next lead after all.

*****

"You can't attack them head on. Not now, at least." Said Allya, while trying not to gawp at her surroundings.

When she'd heard 'command center', she'd expected something similar to what they'd had during the various battles, meaning a somewhat chaotic, but well furnished observation post with a lot of maps.

Instead she was in something that could have been pulled straight out of one of the few functional Old World voidships the Eris Empire had gotten its hands on. Or at least it looked like the pictures Cassissa had showed her, violating probably every single security protocol the Empire had about such things in the process.

There were screens everywhere, a variety of consoles, going from simple button and switch covered boards to full on computer arrays, and a massive holographic projector in the center.

She made a mental note to ask the dungeon core for one of these.

"Oh I don't intend to just bash down their door with a SWAT team shouting 'haut les mains, peau de lapin!', far from that." The vampire maids looked confused, but Allya nodded. One of the few upsides of her family was that she could understand some Terran languages beyond the nigh universal standard English, and French was one of them. Which apparently delighted the core to no end, although she did try to keep a lid on it, to avoid confusing the rest of her subordinates too much. "I'm planning on a far more…discreet extraction."

"And I'm still advising against it." Said Allya, being very careful not to say she'd forbid it. She had very little doubt the dungeon core would do whatever she damn pleased, but would probably be as receptive to constructive criticism as ever, and adverse to being ordered around. Something Starvak should really have figured out months ago. "These people, whoever they are, have advanced technology and the willingness to use it. That, or extremely potent magic. Either way, someone is bound to be asking for regular check ins. And if they fail to respond, especially if they vanish without a trace, the shit will hit the fan, hard."

"They didn't seem to have taken the disappearance of the pirates too hard."

"They were on a suicide mission. Besides which, they probably sent a message as soon as they got back into town. That man might simply be their ticket out of there. But that's not even the main issue. The problem right now is that we're in the middle of blowing Starvak's feet from under him. That means two things: first, the adventurers are on edge. They're wound up so much they have more in common with springs than anything else. And second, Starvak is bound to be looking for anything, anything at all, to avoid getting his head on the proverbial chopping block, and keep the guild's power here somewhat intact. And that's a deadly combination. If adventurers, which are already jumpy as hell, stumble upon your strike team, you can bet he'll pounce on the occasion. Even if you kill everyone and leave no witnesses, a tall order in the residential district, he will still raise hell and tear the place apart to find the culprits, especially as we'd have to permanently kill the adventurers for there to be any point about taking them out."

Alexandra looked at the baroness with what looked like profound respect, and she relaxed a fraction.

"Well, those are excellent points baroness. Very well, I will defer to you on this matter. For now, at least. I will also be keeping them under as close surveillance as I can manage."

"That's probably for the best. If nothing else, we might need to track them out."

"Oh, don’t worry. If they get on an airship, that vessel won't be leaving the city."

That got Allya's blood to run cold. She'd seen the dungeon's rebuilt air defences, now that there was no need to hide them. The fortress wasn't fully rebuilt yet -the bulk of the funds and time still went to bringing the dungeon proper back online-, but there was still several dozen missiles poking out through firing embrasures. And that wasn't even mentioning the canons or what suspiciously looked like some kind of massive harpoon gun.

If the dungeon core decided an airship had to die, it would. Even the Dusk Blade would fall before the stupendous amount of firepower she'd assembled, although she had little doubt the battleship, however damaged it had been, would still give the fortress a run for its money before going down.

"Relax." Said Alexandra, clearly divining what was going through her head. "I'm not going to shoot it down. Simply throw a wrench in the gears, so to speak. Won't stop them forever, but I'm sure I can sabotage the airship itself and leave it grounded with 'maintenance issues' for a while."

"Until they change ships."

"True, but I'm sure we'll come up with some other creative solutions as well. If every ship they get on starts breaking down, they'll start having some doubts after all."

"Right. Still, this at least give us some inkling of what's going on." Allya shivered. "I've never heard of this 'Order', but even if they've only done half of what you suspect they did, their organization fucking terrifies me."

"You and me both sister. You and me both."

*****

Alexandra sighed as she looked at the schematics, and up at Emilia, who had her eyebrows raised.

"I thought you told the baroness you weren't going to send a strike team in?"

"I did, and I intend to keep my word. However, good ol' Murphy has a tendency to fuck everyone's neat little plans up. Hence this." She slapped the schematics.

"Still not sure why you need them."

"The praetorian guard wasn't adequate." She smiled at the golems. "No offense." She didn't get a response, but she could swear she saw the golems relax a bit. Fucking hell, they could understand her. "But they're designed primarily to protect us both. They're uncomprisingly built to fight defensively in friendly territory, made to hold the line long enough for reinforcements to arrive. They're unbelievably deadly, true, but they're not built to go seek out a target outside the dungeon, possibly in the middle of an enemy army, and kill it. It's a testament to the robustness of their design that they managed to perform that role to some level when boarding the supply ship, but even then we got shredded. And we were better prepared, leagues ahead in terms of intelligence and planning, not to mention had a fair few weapons they simply didn't, which allowed us to neatly counter the ones they deployed that we lacked." Courtesy of Seraph and Ella mostly, but the supply ship never had the pulse grenades or unwinder rounds, although whether it was because they simply weren't cost effective, not thought necessary, or the tech had been lost by that point was beyond her ability to tell. "So I'm going to build dedicated spec ops. Units made to kick the ever living shit out of someone, do something, and then bounce the hell out."

"Raiders."

"Something like that. Closer to star marine force recon really. One of the things that nearly killed us was the scanners and other intelligence gathering systems. This times I'm packing radars and every type of sensor I can into their heads, and then giving them recon drones to go forward and see what's there before they poke their nose in."

"Sounds more like star berets at that point."

Alexandra shook her head.

"We're still quite a bit away from EFSN spec ops I'm afraid. But we're getting there." She looked a the schematics. "Getting there quickly in fact. A lot of our guns wouldn't have looked out of place in a European Federation reserve armoury, and some are outright beyond what even Arcadia could have built."

"Afraid about exceeding the limits of your knowledge?"

"Honey, I went beyond everything I knew the second I woke up here. But here I am, with an army of magitech soldiers at my fingertips, coding magic left and right. I believe I'm doing alright with going beyond the limits of my old knowledge. No, what bugs me is that even if we successfully extract the contents of the databanks, we'll have a broader tech base, but not a higher one. Outside of that damned cruiser weapon they fired at Starvak, everything the ships used was as good as or inferior to what we had from Seraph."

"So that means that if we need better stuff…"

"We'll have to start inventing it ourselves. Fortunately, I have a few ideas." More than a few in fact.

"Knowing you, I bet it's a bit more than that."

Alexandra chuckled. Well, her girlfriend did know her well.

"True, true. Regardless, just in case things go sideways, hard, I still want to have the option to kick the good captain's door and plug her full of either sleep darts or plasma bolts. So we'll work on those when we can."

"We already have a lot of projects on our hands."

"I know." Alexandra sighed. "Believe me, I know. But the Republic is a known quantity that we have already overpowered. We don't want to underestimate them, especially as it seems the sand krakens are indeed ignoring them, and they probably won't ignore us. At least not if we bring humans along." Since Sand Krakens were attracted by essence, or so said Emilia's books, she was wagering that golems would pass by unmolested. After all, the army of Old World constructs had, hadn't it? Then again, there seemed to be something that scared the ever living shit of all monsters when the Old World, or at least its installations, was concerned. Still, she was planning on using small groups coordinated with long range comms to intercept the republic's army, separating them enough to hopefully avoid an attack. The fact that she was planning on raiding their supply lines made that a lot easier as well, you don't need a full scale division or squadron to take out a few transports, not to mention ruin their quartermasters' day, and smaller, nimbler detachments were preferable at any rate. "But the Order already killed me once, and has proven that they can match, if not overpower us, in terms of tech. Stars know what else they're capable of. So, until something happens to change my mind, they're our absolute priority when it comes to spare resources."

"Roger that."

"Excellent. Now, we just need to see how much of this equipment we can make out of stuff the fabricators can spit out." Alexandra smiled. "I'd like to have the option of using them, but I'd rather not bankrupt ourselves doing it."

"That's good, I'd like not having my extensive salary cut."

They exchanged a laugh, before going to work in earnest.

After all, there was much to be done. And if Allya was right, they were dropped one hell of a time limit on their lap until their first solid, direct lead vanished. Well, besides the Void Blades, but the more she'd dug into their documents, the more Alexandra had realized they were unlikely to tell her much. Whatever she did, they were probably going to be a lot more scared of the Order than her.

That wouldn't last. But for now, she'd keep them on ice while she had other options.

And push comes to shove, well, following two leads at once was a hell of a lot better than following just one. And the Void Blades were most certainly not going anywhere.

At least without being inside a bodybag.