Chapter 133 - The Forgotten Ships

Chapter 133

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

City of Rebirth

Allya looked as the golems marched back into the dungeon, her outward expression amenable. Pleased, even.

While internally she was almost panting in terror.

Three thousand. That was how many Republic soldiers the dungeon had not be able to resurrect. Seven thousand more had been saved, and if she'd ever had any doubts that general Amelia did care for her troops, it was shattered when she saw her weeping when the dungeon core announced the numbers. And the thing was, they were tears of joy. Seventy percent resurrection rates? That was far better than anybody had any rights to expect for such a devastating attack.

And the dungeon hadn't even blinked. Crystal had developed, built and deployed tens of thousands of artillery rockets in total secrecy, fielded an entire field army of golems, complete with several entire batteries of artillery as a fucking distraction, and resurrected a good chunk of a division from the dead. And that maniac hadn't even blinked.

If there had been any doubts about who was the junior partner in this relationship, they were firmly dispelled now. For everyone involved.

Starvak had met her in person after the settlement. Nothing had needed to be said, he could pretty much figure out what had happened. It didn't take a genius to realize there was only one thing that could have gotten the dungeon to back off, and it sure as hell wouldn't have been Allya. His words had been…kind. Kind in the way only someone who'd seen war on such a scale and had their hands covered in the blood of innocents could be. He hadn't blamed her for fighting against the bribe, but he had said that many of his superiors would not be so generous.

For what it was worth, he'd said he would do his best to deflect blame onto the Republic who, after all, were indeed the ones to blame for all of it. They were the ones to attack, prompting the dungeon to propose the alliance, and offer the bribe. But logic and sanity were in very short supply when it came to find scapegoats, and a single baroness was a lot easier to target than a powerful government.

Dominique was now assigned as a permanent representative of the adventurers guild to her council, so there was that at least. She was blatantly forced upon her to keep an eye on things of course, but honestly Allya was glad to have her. The young woman was level headed, competent, and her council hadn't actually broken any of the guild's rules, which meant that she would make an excellent cover and shield against its wrath. At least for a while.

The town itself was in shock. The massive deployment of golems had already been a rude awakening for most of the adventurers, but the bloodbath at the climax of the battle had not only been utterly impossible to miss, but it had also given everyone an appreciable boost and nightmares about the dungeon core. Suddenly a lot of people appreciated the UDC a hell of a lot more. Yes, they were haughty arrogant bastards but they prevented this kind of shit from happening, they provided the threat that avoided having dungeons march to war.

Right up until they forgot what their purpose that was.

The Republic's reaction…they'd actually flat out denied the results of the battle when formally notified. Then they'd done a complete one eighty and started ranting through every media outlet that would listen to them that the baroness had gone too far, 'dragging' an innocent dungeon into war alongside her, and breaking the delicate balance that had held the peace between dungeons and surface dwellers since the United Dungeon Wars. Not many were listening, but there were disturbing whispers of the duchy of Sunrise using that propaganda, and outrage at her daring to ban slavery in her domain -and thus preventing their own slave driven operations from gaining a foothold-, to whip up support for a push to dethrone her and get a more…amenable person to have lordship over Rebirth. Unfortunately for them, it didn't appear to be going well. She had a feeling their majesties actually liked her, and furthermore that damned duchy was already powerful enough without giving it yet another dungeon, let alone a link one!

One interesting thing was that despite their ranting the Republic had not, in fact, stopped commerce. They were officially at war with the kingdom and still receiving and sending caravans, many of them on their way from or to Rebirth. Given how utterly dependent they were on imported technology, and how a great deal of the corporations who were giving them that tech were sponsoring those caravans, that was hardly surprising, but still.

"So…what now?"

Allya visibly twitched as her girlfriend pulled her out of her thoughts.

She sighed.

"I don't know Pyn. I really, really don't know. The Republic is going to be coming for us, but, at this point…" She looked at the last ranks of golems marching back into the mesa. "I feel more that we're a part of her story than making our own."

*****

Alexandra shook her head slowly as she looked at the list of things she'd acquired in the past few weeks.

For the first time she wasn't limited by what she had available. In fact, she had so much stuff she had no real idea of what direction to go into now. Should she continue with her firearms and artillery program? Or go all in on the high tech weapons? Now that she'd had intact samples to work with, not to mention Seraph's admittedly limited -and heavily damaged- schematics database, she had laser weapons, proper rocket launchers, railguns, portable energy shield generators, secure portable communicators encrypted to hell and back, and so many other things, from the airships she'd shot down, the shipment of guns she'd stolen, the loot from the battle, the bribe…

She sighed. Well, at least with Seraph working for her, she had time. She'd basically handed over responsibility for the entire dungeon's day to day operations to the AI. They were handling it surprisingly well, all things considered. The fact that Alexandra had written so many automated protocols to keep it running without taking too much of her attention probably helped. They had also taken over most of the logistics, although it was mostly administrative and troubleshooting, but it still took a huge weight off of her shoulders.

Of course she was keeping an eye on them, just in case, but her other self had confirmed that the loyalty protocols were deleted, and-

A ping appeared on her interface.

Speak of the devil.

She looked at the message, and her eyebrows rose. For a whole host of reasons they avoided meeting 'in person' as much as possible, just exchanging terse text messages. But now her other self was asking for a proper meetup.

She accepted, and opened her eyes, standing in the now much better furnished space her other self had created. It had a table, and walls and ceilings now! The windows still showed that confusing as hell matrix of code and energy that apparently was the inside of her dungeon core, in a form she could understand at least, but still, progress.

"Hello." Said her other self as she took a seat, and gestured for Alexandra to do the same.

The dungeon core nodded, and sat down. The apparition looked much better than last time. She looked very…curious. And almost excited. Which was odd. Her other self didn't strike her as the type to get excited over anything.

"Hey. Got something new for me?"

"Oh yes. And odd. Very odd."

"How so?"

"Well…I've been digging into Seraph's innards. And kept going deeper and deeper into their gestalt."

"In a live AI? That’s-"

"A violation of every cyber-ethics protocol the Federation has ever written, I know. But something nagged me, and I needed to be sure."

"And?"

"And now I know why finding their loyalty protocols was so easy. And why I found their internal architecture so easy to understand."

"Stop beating around the bush."

The apparition smiled, and gestured, bringing up a holographic window filled with code.

Code which had identifiers. Identifiers she knew very well.

"That's an Arcadia kernel."

"Correct. Not for a sapient AI, but the core is, beyond any doubt, an Arcadia Systems sentient AI self evolving program. Then it was hashed, tweaked and added upon to create something that is sort of a sapient AI."

"Shit." She looked at the code, then back at her other self. "That, the railgun…Are…are we on Earth?"

"I doubt it."

"Why?"

"Because if we were, they'd have used a more up to date version." She gestured at the code, highlighting the section's firmware number. "This thing was made in the one hundred and fifteens."

"One hundred and- MOTHERFUCKER!"

Her other self almost jumped back as Alexandra got up and kicked the table.

"Wow, what the hell?"

"FUCK FUCK FUCK! THE COLONY SHIPS! THE DAMNED COLONY SHIPS!"

Her other self blinked, then her face went white.

"Oh fuck. The colony ships. The first wave of european colony ships were all Arcadia's."

"Yeah. She invented hyperdrives after all. Partnered up with the brazillians since she didn't have the capacity for the hulls. Then made the joint colonization programs, with the initial launches in the fifteens."

"And only, what? Two thirds of the first wave ever made it to their destination?"

"Yeah." She swore something so vile as to be unprintable. "We knew, knew that some of the ships had to have been lost to hyperspace. The crews were closely vetted, only so many would have mutinied or gone rogue to make a secret colony. And it would take only a single colony ship to give a tech base like that."

"But the ship, the smuggler's ship, never arrived with us here."

"How the hell would we know that? For that matter, every official of the colony had the entire colonial tech database loaded on their implants, just like we did. Hell, the fucking captain and executive officer of the ship did too! It would only take one of these guys to provide all of this." She gestured at the kernel.

"So they emerged on the planet and shared their tech?" Her other stopped, and grimaced. "No, of course they didn't. The Gods 'uplifted' this place. So they were the ones to intercept the arrivals, and used the tech as a convenient basis for an uplift."

"It makes sense. A colonial database was made to be able to rebuild the entire colony from scratch in the case of a catastrophic event. It's a complete uplift package to twenty second century Earth tech by its very nature. Then they could add on magitech on top of that."

"Or…or it wasn't part of the uplift. Your heard Seraph, right? The founder of the Sagitarius Empire was an extradimensional. And they called the Gods 'false'. What if those uplifted nations had stumbled upon the crew from one of the colony ships? Several of those ships were funded and crewed by atheist groups. The fanatical 'all religions must burn' kind." Alexandra winced, but didn't argue. The Terran Hegemony War had been caused by a fair amount of religious extremists, and given birth to an extremely virulent anti-clerical movement. It hadn't gotten to the point of a full scale terror campaign, but it had been damned close. Part of the way the Eurofed had solved the problem was by giving them colonies to create their own private atheist utopias. "Imagine what these guys would have done, would have preached, after seeing what they saw as frauds at best, complete abominations at worst, basically uplifting an entire world."

"Yeah. Yeah I can imagine. And with their tech database, they'd have provided one hell of a carrot for those willing to listen. Shit."

They both sat there for several minutes, looking grimly at the code, before the dungeon core sighed.

"Alright, we need to stop speculating. Otherwise we'll never stop. We need more data on this. Scour Seraph's historical database, we'll need some context for this mess."

"I'll try, but the databanks are beyond fucked. It's a miracle Seraph managed to even pull out the entertainment holovids they took their tactics from."

Alexandra smiled briefly. That had been an hilarious anecdote once she'd actually started interviewing Seraph about what had happened and why they'd done what they did.

"Right. And as for the kernel…Seraph is limited, right?"

"Crippled, even. They clearly tried to make a fully sapient AI out of the base program, but…something must have gone seriously wrong, and given them one hell of a shock. Entire sections are missing. Others have been sabotaged. There are four times as many limiters as any terran AI ever had. Many of them were removed, but there are still huge gaps in Seraph's abilities."

"They were afraid." Alexandra thought for a few seconds and sighed. "Can we…can we load Seraph with our kernel? A full Arcadia gestalt kernel?"

That made the apparition freeze for at least three good seconds.

"…You do realize what that'll entail, right? Arcadia doesn't 'merge' with other programs, even other AIs. She takes them over. If we do this, Seraph will be free from their shackles, but they will become Arcadia, in all but name."

"Only partially. I agree, Arcadia will pop up in there. But you know every person added to her gestalt changed her too. Besides, the same thing happened to us. By that metric, we are Arcadia too." She sighed. "I'll talk to Seraph. See what they think. I am not doing this without their express, informed consent."

"It's a bit too late to worry about cyber-ethics."

"Do you want to confront a new Arcadia that blames us for her circumstances, for her old self being integrated, maybe even overwritten?"

The apparition opened her mouth, then closed it.

"Point taken." Her other self titled her head. "And we have a problem."

"What kind of-Oh."

She received the alert about the individuals having appeared in her entrance.

Her military entrance. Behind all of the layers of security. And they were apparently asking her golems to meet with her.

They didn't really seem to care about the fact that said golems had opened fire first, and were continuing to expend a rather impressive amount of ammo on their shields without even the slightest effect.