Embers After Flames, Chapter 12.0

12.0

+++

The post-war plans had been utterly meticulous.

They had been assembled over the course of years. Data had been gathered. Information had been compared. Projections had been formed. Refinements had been made continuously.

Changes had been made almost as often, too. Not big ones, mind. They were small changes instead, taking into account what had been used up, what had been lost, what had been developed, and what had entered and left the realms of feasibility.

When the time came for those plans to be implemented, we were running a bit low on what we’d have liked to have... but hell, that was basically the RLF in a nutshell.

We handled it all the same.

It did not start immediately, of course. Certain allowances had to be made.

The first thing that Flatwell did was broadcast to the entire planet that things had finally changed on Rubicon. The PCA, he announced, had been destroyed utterly, and the two megacorps that had been warring over the Coral had been defeated as well.

The proof was immediately evident. After all, it was basically fucking impossible to miss the fact that the Closure Satellites had fired upon the Ice Field a few dozen times, and confirming that the Satellites had changed ownership was easy when you only needed a good telescope to spot the red Coral lights that swarmed around in orbit.

Needless to say, this was great news to... well, pretty much everyone on Rubicon that wasn’t a merc, an independent, or corporate.

The later afternoon time did not stop the parties from starting.

From RLF bases to civilian zones, revelry took over the people. The knowledge that the planet had indeed been liberated was a powerful one, the culmination of decades of effort. For some it was relief. For others, joy.

Dolmayan made it back to Belius in the depths of the night, escorted by a contingent of C-Weapons. He arrived to cheers, and so he offered his cheers in turn, bringing the base’s energy into something loud but happy. After seemingly the entirety of the base had shoved drinks, accolades, and sundries into his hands, he and Freddie finally managed to make an escape.

I did not see them for the rest of the night.

Just about everyone got in on the fun. That meant that my Antigens were very busy making sure ALLMIND wasn’t pulling a sneaky, but on this day of all days, I wasn’t going to begrudge them for it.

The real work started on the next day.

Flatwell called in pretty much everyone to relay orders. He sent teams up to the Ice Field, in preparation for taking the remaining Corporate forces into custody. He had the crews organise, before sending them out to different parts of Belius, getting ready for the next big project that was going to actually cement all of this effort.

When that side of things was done, he called a meeting with the civilian leaders, the people who were in charge of each Civilian Zone and responsible for the day-to-day operations there. Like most civilians on Rubicon, these too were people who were effectively part of the RLF, though it had not ever been actually announced out loud where the PCA might hear and subsequently take offence.

With Rubicon successfully liberated, the Rubicon Liberation Front had succeeded in its goal. Ergo, it was time to move on to the next step.

First, without the overwhelmingly powerful outside enemy that had required nothing less than total commitment of resources in order to fight, it was now possible to start releasing duties back to the civilian governments. The current leaders of the civilian zones, previously operating mostly separately, now had the task of working together and reuniting everything. That was a process that was going to take a while, obviously, but there were a few things that could be done here and now, which were also rather very necessary to do since nobody was under the illusion that they were actually safe, yet.

The orbitals may now be under our control, but they weren’t actually invincible. Getting the planet itself up to a reasonable state was a necessity.

That would require a bit of work, which was already underway.

The Rubicon Liberation Front, technically speaking, promptly dissolved then and there. It had already organised itself along particular lines, and a lot of those lines were easy to reintegrate into the other side of things. Most of its medical personnel, for example, were fully trained and ready to be pushed into the rest of the system. Most of its combat assets immediately transformed into the new military, since they were basically doing the same thing already. What Flatwell was doing was cutting off a lot of the extra weight and time intensive parts that were no longer necessary for him to keep an eye on.

It was rather informal at the moment, but the details had been worked out in advance. Flatwell was being put in charge of getting everything the planet needed to stay safe together, and he was being given effectively carte blanche to do it. He’d already been doing it for three decades, so it wasn’t like this was a hard choice for anybody.

At the moment, it was de facto, but once the proper government was in place, it would become de jure.

The first step, again, was already underway. To keep Rubicon safe, it needed to be rebuild as much of its industry as possible.

I had, over the course of the last few decades, examined pretty much every single Grid on the planet. All the ones too far north were in various states of ruin, but the closer we came to the equatorial line, the more intact they were. Between the PCA and the Dosers, most of them had subsequently been sabotaged and/or looted, and left incapable of operating properly without large-scale, usually noticeable repairs.

The PCA had been reasonably thorough. The Dosers had not.

There were a couple Grids here and there that would only require relatively minor repairs, and there were plenty of Grids that still had perfectly viable components that could be installed and employed in a different Grid. Moving such components would have previously almost certainly resulted in the PCA shooting down the transport, but now that the PCA no longer existed?

Heh.

Dunham took the first of the construction crews the next morning, the man happy to be working in his original job again. Most of them, Dunham included, were spectacularly hungover, but the Augmentations that they were rocking had completely sobered them by the time that they’d actually arrived, and they weren’t going to be getting into the heavy work on the very first day, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

The 215-230 Grid Cluster was their target, and the entire sector had enough components to bring two Grids back into full operation relatively quickly. Once they confirmed everything and built a plan of action, they’d start to bring a Grid back online.

And from there... Well.

Grids are fully capable of fabricating everything you need to build another Grid. Replacing a few small components where necessary? Easy.

Feeding the Grids would be a problem. Since the initial throughput was the most important, Flatwell had elected to take the Strider and return it to its original purpose. The modifications that had been made during militarization were not easily undone, and so they weren’t going to bother with most of it. It wouldn’t operate at the capacity it once had, but feeding a few Grids was very different to feeding the entire network. It could handle the former just fine.

All of that, however, was for later.

I, too, had obligations.

Two sets of them, even.

The first set was the bigger obligations, to the future and to Rubicon itself. For them, first, I had to prepare for the eventual revelation of our existence and nature to the Rubiconian populace. That, too, was planned for later, after we knew who was going to be active in the long-term, just to make sure there’d be no problems.

The secret was, however, no longer so severe, and so I was likely to end up approaching a bunch of Stage Five candidates that ultimately hadn’t been taken on board for one reason or another. There were a considerable number already, and no small amount of the former RLF personnel knew me as someone who they had never physically met, but who was endorsed by both Flatwell and Dolmayan, and that gave me plenty of respect when I proved it was warranted.

The second thing I had to do for that entire matter was to get all the Coral under control as soon as possible. All the stray pockets had to be gathered, the Firestorms had to be quelled, and the Wells had to be drained. Coral was, as a substance, too dangerous to just leave lying around, and my children and I were the ones who were the most qualified to handle it.

There were more things, but they would come later.

As the second set of obligations... well, in truth, they were just things I wanted to do, but they were much more personal rather than something so distant as the first set.

+++

“An invitation?” Carla asked.

“Yep.” I said, deliberately popping the ‘p’.

“You’re a real weird one, you know?” She said. “How can you just invite us? I sure as hell wouldn’t.”

“I’m not you, Carla.” I said. “As it happens, I’m actually capable of trusting people to not start too many problems.”

She scoffed. “And what, you think we can just up and go?”

“I know you lot already packed your bags in preparation for an intervention in the Ice Field.” I said. The intervention, obviously, had not been necessary at all... but they had been in no position to know that. “So... Yes.”

She huffed. It was performative. “Y’know, we still don’t know you that well. Going through the effort to get us alone and isolated? It’s suspicious!”

I let the silence speak for itself.

“Alright, yeah, that wasn’t my best.” She admitted.

“Mmmhmm.” I agreed. “We’ll skip the back and forth about opportunity, shall we?”

“Sure.” She said. “But seriously, why the invite?”

“I have this habit of thinking that people do occasionally deserve nice things.” I understated. “You can’t tell me that you weren’t curious. During our discussion last time, you determined that I would contain the Coral, but you never did ask how.”

“Because it didn’t matter.” Carla shrugged. “With full access to the Institute’s combined knowledge, making a way to properly contain Coral wouldn’t require anything special. For you, your family, in particular, I imagine it would be even easier. You’ve got all the advantages there.” She sighed. “Of course, seeing what you did to the CEL and SOL models, I can’t imagine you settled for mediocrity...”

“Oh. And look at that. You have an invitation.” I mocked.

“I run a business!” She threw her hands to the side. “I can’t just throw that to the side!”

“What blatant lies that spill from your mouth.” I observed.

“Pfffthahahaha!” Carla laughed. “I could barely get through that myself! So, am I going to launch myself through the Intercontinental Cargo Launcher, or what?”

“I’ll send a transport.” I said. “A new model. Derived from the old Albatross transports.”

“The Albies?” She asked. “I basically forgot about that thing after my first design! Ah, it’s been so long~”

“It’ll get you here quickly enough.” It was a supersonic mass transport that achieved said speed through Coral-powered rockets. An early foray of Carla’s designs, that’s for sure. “Walter and Raven will arrive before you. Ayre, naturally, will also be there.”

“Walter’s coming?” She asked. “Why?”

“He’s there for support.” I explained. “Or worry. One of the two. Like I said, I believe that people deserve nice things sometimes. And after all the help that Raven has given me, providing some help in turn is the least I can do, and by far the best thing I can do for Raven is to start fixing things.”

Carla sat up. Humour fell away, replaced with surprise. “You mean, you’re going to...”

“Raven is a bit overdue for an upgrade.” I said.

And there’s a lot of things to fix with those old Augments.