Embers After Flames, Chapter 11.1

11.1

+++

It was sheer irony that the most protected and most important part of the PCA’s entire apparatus was also the most vulnerable, to me.

It was something I found greatly amusing. I could have, at any point in time, simply reached in and ripped out the heart of the beast. Put an end to it all... I had refrained, however, because it had never been the right time to do it.

The problem was always that it wasn’t just the Enforcement System that was the enemy. We couldn’t simply blow up the mainframe and be done with it.

For starters, there had been all the Human personnel of the PCA, all of which were fully capable of pursuing a war effort on their own if they really had to. The absence of the Enforcement System would severely hamper them, but they’d had the numbers to do extreme damage if they’d decided to just bullrush the place, and, obviously, that was highly undesirable.

Would we win? Probably. Would it be a pyrrhic victory? Yes.

The problem after that was all the people that the PCA was keeping out. If the Enforcement System was destroyed, it was only a matter of time before someone came in. Whether it would be a group from the Civilised Collective coming to find out what the fuck happened, or a corporate group battering down the Closure Satellites through sheer brute force was unknowable, but either scenario would have been bad.

It was also one particular matter where I wasn’t able to help as much as I normally could.

The thing is, despite the similarities I share, in the end I’m not actually an AGI. My body is Coral, and my mind couldn’t leave it. I did not have the ability to fork copies of myself into compatible systems. I couldn’t clone myself into other masses of Coral, either.

This rather sharply limited my ability to act away from Rubicon. I could handle anything on the surface with a bit of preparation, anything in orbit with a bit more preparation, but out in interplanetary space? Forget it.

That was a problem when it came to defending the star system and extracting its resources for usage.

That, I would need the RLF for. Most space-stuff in general, I would need the RLF for.

That’s a major part of what Flatwell had been working towards for all this time; Training people in preparation to take over everything Rubicon would need to defend itself. We hadn’t had it before, and technically speaking, we didn’t have it at the full level we wanted it now.

As such, the capability went unused- and unnoticed.

It was, admittedly, not something that they could have any way to expect. The idea that the final guardian of the mainframe could be turned at the drop of a hat? Absurd. No such indications existed.

Dolmayan had twice shown the ability to turn C-Weapons, but the EPHEMERA had not been a C-Weapon. The Coral that went into its control system was solely for transmission. A relay.

All the directives came from a separate module. An AI core, for standard EPHEMERA ACs. A control receiver, for the one that the Enforcement System had taken over.

It would have been downright unreasonable to consider this a possibility without having information that the Enforcement System had never been able to acquire.

Even if the Enforcement System had decided it somehow presented a danger, the truth of the matter is that it wouldn’t have changed that much. Rather than having an AC on the inside, I would have simply brought in a C-Weapon from directly below, and that would accomplish the job just the same.

Ah well.

There was nothing that the Enforcement System could do about it now.

This had been in planning for a long time indeed...

I started to run the calculations. I wanted to make sure that this worked exactly the way that it should. There would not be any fucking around, here. Trajectories were checked, expected impacts calculated. Efficiency was ranked, and then the best one chosen.

The Closure Satellite’s Mass Driver settled into place. The Satellite, as it was programmed, requested further authorisation to begin preparations, which I did not hesitate to grant.

The station’s generator took only a moment to ignite, energy beginning to flow towards the capacitors. Internally, a payload was shifted into place.

Removing the Enforcement System was step one. As noted, the personnel of the PCA were another potential vector for warfare. That is why we had spent so much time and effort killing them off. That was why I had planned this entire operation.

The vast majority of the remaining personnel were chasing Dolmayan. Either immediately present, or actively converging on his position.

Step two is getting rid of as many of them as possible.

I’d actually had fewer options for this than one would expect. My preferred choice would have been to turn their autonomous units against them, but the IFFs were practically firmware, and it was not actually possible to issue a remote update that would have them all turn upon the piloted machines. A shame, because then I could have Order 66’d them, and that would have dramatically simplified things.

Ah well. That simply forced me to move on to the next simplest option, which also happened to be significantly more spectacular.

Bombing the absolute shit out of them.

I was, through my control over the Enforcement System’s mainframe, still receiving consistent updates from the entirety of the PCA. Most of these consisted of automated data packets, sent out on the regular from PCA forces. Most of these were filtered out at the top layer, since most of them amounted to ‘situation normal, nothing interesting’. There were some requests being made to the Enforcement System, and some information that was being supplied, too. That provided me all the location data I could ever possibly want.

It also provided me an in on their command system, but honestly... it wasn’t necessary. Dolmayan’s efforts had already gathered a ton of forces in small, concentrated locations.

The only thing I was waiting on was confirmation from the man himself.

“I am in the shelter!” Dolmayan reported.

I’d have smiled if I could.

Just in time.

“Confirmed.” I spoke. In orbit, the gun began to charge.

Someone in the target zone noticed. A request went out to the Enforcement System, the troop declaring a code.

For a moment, I debated to myself on whether or not I should answer it. I certainly had the means to pretend to be the Enforcement System, at least for a small amount of time, anyway. Then I realised that it didn’t really matter either way, since there was nothing that they or anybody else could do about it.

The only answer I gave was permission for the gun to fire.

Electricity sparked along the barrel, lightning arcing away from it. The payload was launched, and it tore its way through the atmosphere to its target in slightly over a second, leaving nothing but a trail of plasma in its wake.

The shot was not fired at its full capacity. Unlike the last time the Closure Satellites had been used to bombard a planetary target, the target wasn’t a Grid. The target was a large number of widespread units of varying strength hovering in a rough circle. Fully charging the shot was wholly unnecessary, since it didn’t need to break through a Grid’s megastructure.

It was just as effective without it.

The payload slammed into the ground, and vaporised under the sheer kinetic energy. Plasma burst outwards in every direction. Below, there were only vast sheets of ice, sublimating under the power that had been unleashed in this single moment.

For the Grid, the separated layers of the megastructure had acted like a whipple shield, trapping significant proportions of the plasma that had been unleashed inside the Grid itself. For this ice, that wasn’t the case. The only thing past the ice was more ice, kilometres and kilometres of ice. The ice was shattering, but the plasma was actually being reflected more completely.

It had nowhere to go but up.

For the PCA fleets that were in the area, everything happened very quickly.

There was a distant flash of light. For the Augmented, if they happened to be looking in the direction, they would have had a brief moment to see the payload coming. They would not be able to do anything about it, though.

When it hits the ground, there will be a flash of light so intense that it can burn the skin. The plasma and superheated steam that follows in its wake is even more dangerous, spraying in every direction. It consumes the entire area in an instant. The heat and force of it is enough to destroy everything caught in the area, and heavily armoured machines aren’t enough to save the PCA, not in the face of this.

For most, death is quick, a flash of light and then it’s over. Even the Warships aren’t immune to this, because the strike has unleashed the energy equivalent of a gigaton-scale nuclear weapon. The only thing that separates it is the lack of radiation effects. The only survivors, unfortunate as they are to not die instantly, are at least ten kilometres away from the impact site. By then, the blast has weakened enough to not crumple Warships like tin cans outright, but it is still powerful enough that it shatters the weaker parts of the structure. The bridges, for example, are always vulnerable. For the crew, they experience maybe twenty seconds of confusion and terror before the ships crash and the capacitors detonate.

The supermajority of the largest group has been wiped out in an instant. Whatever survivors exist, they’ll be on the absolute edges of the blast, and any form of cohesion that had existed no longer does.

I send a command to the Closure Satellite. The Generator fires up again, and the cannon shifts once more.

Every remaining group is both smaller, and further away. However, they were still numerous, and I had no reason to stop yet.

The Mass Driver fired again, and another vanished in a magnificent flash. The Mass Driver changed positions, and I added yet another target.

Over and over again, the Closure Satellite fired. Plumes of steam, ice, and rock rose into the air after every shot, something which would no doubt lead to some rather interesting effects on the weather, but nobody lived in the Ice Fields, so it was hardly a concern.

By the end of it, the vast majority of PCA forces had been completely and utterly obliterated.

Finally, the Closure Satellite was given permission to return to its normal mode.

“Phase five, complete.” I reported. “PCA casualties estimated at ninety six percent.” I focused on Dolmayan for a moment. “How are you holding?”

“I certainly felt the shaking.” He spoke. “But your facility functioned as intended. I’m fine.”

Hah... good.

The ‘shelter’ he was referring to was, in truth, a modified drillship that had been constructed relatively recently in preparation for operations in the Ice Field. Rather than being built to carry a lot of things, it was only meant to carry a single AC. It could handle maybe two, if you got creative with how you arranged them.

Additionally, and much like the ICE WORM, which had inspired the original, it had a double-layered barrier field protecting it. It had surfaced only moments before Dolmayan had arrived at its position, and the moment he’d gotten inside, it had started to dig right back underground.

Coupled with the distance he’d gained in his all-out sprint to safety, and that was enough to survive without damage... though I could see that the barriers had taken damage nonetheless.

Mmm. Not unexpected. Still... “I think we can call that operation a resounding success.” I stated.

Oh! I have satellite data now! Excellent, now I don’t need to rely on Antigens for everything. Just going to incorporate that into the systems... there we go.

“I’m closing the missio-”

“Wait.” Dolmayan said. “There are still some remaining forces.”

“... Are you sure?” I asked. “You’ve been through a lot already.”

“To be completely honest?” He asked. “I feel more energised than ever.”

You know what? That’s fair. “Resupplies are available.” I said. “You’ve taken nothing but outer damage, so a repair pack will fix you right up. This facility will surface shortly. C-Weapon support will be on the way shortly.”

“Thank you.” He said, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

“You’re welcome. Anything else?”

“I have a request, actually.” Seria spoke up. “Would you mind if I borrowed one of those C-Weapons?”

Heh. She was my daughter through and through.

“Of course, dear. Take your pick.”

Alright. Operation Decapitation marked complete, and successful.

Now it was time for cleanup.