Chapter 139 - Experiments (Patreon)

Notes :

Yes, that's a pretty transparent Space Station 13 & 14 easter egg.

The queue is now empty, because...honestly I'm completely drained and I might be depressed. My sleep schedule has gone out the window and I just feel bone deep tired constantly with everything in my body or my home constantly failing. For example I think my AC's fan is failing, and from time to time my vision is just constantly twitching from side to side. Oh, and one of the wooden support pillars in my home now has cracks so wide and so deep I can put my fingers in them, apparently because of the dryness and the heatwave. Hurray.

I'm going to try and get back on my feet, write a couple of chapters and try to rebuild a patreon backlog. There may be a couple of lore files as well. Maybe one for MFR, written in a character's voice. That could be fun.

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy the chapter.

Chapter 139

Starborn Mountains, Mount Nebula

Crash Site

Sapphiria sighed as she hopped out of the minecart. Going through the salvage had been...well, quick this time. For one Gregor was getting better at it, and for another, most of it was so completely screwed that the old skeleton had barely glanced at it before putting it in the 'recycle' pile.

"Welcome home." Said Cia as her hologram appeared. "I see you have brought home...the idiom mentions 'the bacon', but searches in the library core have turned up farcical trials for recently wed couples in exchange for animal protein products."

"...I'm sorry, what?"

"Library reference, Ancient Terran Customs, Europe, Essex, Great Dunmow, 'Flitch of Bacon'."

Sapphiria pinged the library, and her eyebrows rose.

"Ooookay. Why did bring home the bacon return...Nevermind." She shook her head. "Doesn't apply anyway. It's not like I'm married to Kalia."

It was the simulacrum's turn to raise an eyebrow by millimeters.

"Of course not." She said, the 'yet' ringing as loud as a gunshot despite being unspoken. Sapphiria however, decided to ignore it.

"Status report."

The simulacrum straightened.

"The first new mining bots have begun operations, and construction has begun on the electronics fabricator."

"Magnificent." She was still chaffing at the time it was taking, but to be fair she was building up faster than anything on this planet ever could. Probably. It just felt slow because she'd used to have the industrial capacity of a top of the line naval carrier at her fingertips. The Starprism would have flattened the Bane in a fortnight, and built a full scale naval shipyard as well as an entire orbital habitat to house the squishies in the time since she'd arrived. As well as a lot more besides.

Truth be told part of the problem was that the colonial schematics weren't very adapted to the industry her escape pod brought to the table as a baseline. Which, fair enough, they were made to be deployed by a colony ship. And using off the shelf schematics that had been tried and tested for centuries, sometimes under extremely trying circumstances, and managed to keep the squishies alive had been the right choice. She just wished some more specialized stuff had been made for...

Well, okay, the very low chance that for some reason the escape pod would crashland on a planet with squishies bereft of an advanced industrial base, instead of borrowing into an asteroid like it was supposed to. She still wasn't clear why that had happened, since the navigations computer had separated with the escape booster, and presumably either flung itself into the sun or went 'boom' when someone tried to intercept it.

"The first batches of clothes have also been delivered, and the textile plant is working on the next ones."

Sapphiria blinked. She'd...completely forgotten about that. Thankfully picking up things her AI was too distracted to keep on top of was literally Cia's job description and reason of being.

"Where did you get the measurements?"

"Archived scan data. As well as sending a message to the surface, asking for the colonists most in need of new attire."

"A message to whom, exactly?" There was a flash of worry in Sapphiria's mind. Kalia had figured out there was someone else down here because of the way Cia's messages were worded. If someone else did...

"Their supply specialist, Copson."

"Oh, right." The bureaucrat. He hadn't had much contact with her, mostly just noting down whatever she brought, or asked for. The latter was mostly 'wood', a steady supply of which came down into the mines nowadays. More than she needed really, but with the chainsaws and other tools Astralis was now running a comfortable surplus. Actually, outside of mana crystals, the town was running at a comfortable surplus of basically everything. Even metals, which she supplied when requested. "Should be good, and he'd certainly know where to send them."

"Affirmative. Repairs have been completed for the remaining damaged units, and material reclamation on the scrap has begun. Experiments are also ongoing on the new samples."

"The new samples?" Sapphiria pinged the minilab. "Oh. The monster bits I grabbed."

"Their properties are proving elusive."

Sapphiria grimaced.

"That's because the minilab is geared for observation, not experimentation. We're not going to learn much by just scanning this stuff. We need to poke them and see what happens."

"We can make a stick from available wood supplies."

"I mean we need some ways to do experiments. Real ones. Something more than a field kit, but I'm not envisioning Carpmosia either."

"Space Station Fourteen?" Said the simulacrum. "It would be an endeavor to construct one here."

Was that...humor? Well. The simulacrum had ever deeper, hidden depths.

"Quite. But it was a necessary one back home."

Carpmosia was the Fourteenth Experiments Station of the National Naval Technologies program, which had originated as a simple commission to make sure that the Federation Navy didn't simply fall into obsolescence after the unification of humanity. For most of its history it had been quietly funding military research and keeping the naval databanks full of designs that were at least reasonably advanced and up to date with current technologies.

Then the war with the Theocracy had come and...well, the quiet little commission abruptly became one of the linchpins keeping humanity alive. It was forced to expand quickly and in every possible direction.

It had built dedicated Experiments Stations before to study particular problems and do, well, experiments in controlled environments where any untoward results were unlikely to leave a hole in something important. Which was to say they were generally deep space somewhere in the Core Worlds, usually within a dozen light years of Sol.

With the war, those stations had to be expanded quickly, and a Thirteenth station was built to handle everything that didn't already have an existing station. Which, with the Theocracy bearing down on humanity, was everything from biological starships to xenohorrors and tailored bioweapons, passing by energy weapons and battlefield salvage.

As a result the station had gained something of a reputation for being an accidents prone madhouse where experiments took place around the clock and damn the risks. The legend that the station had more escape pods than it had crewmembers wasn't quite true, but significant precautions had been taken, and sadly did not always prove sufficient, as was illustrated when the station reactor went critical and blew the entire engineering section to hell, alongside a few hundred squishies that weren't evacuated in time.

After that the Federation's civilian government put its foot down and started leashing back the NNT. Since the battle of Massilia had happened and the Federation was slowly starting to win, slowing down the frenetic pace of experiments was seen as acceptable, and the station was rebuilt in a far safer manner, with greater compartmentalization. It could be argued, in fact, that it wasn't a space station anymore, but several dozen loosely connected ones, each working on a variety of hazardous special projects.

The Fourteenth Experiments Station was meant to solve many of the scope issues that had plagued the Thirteenth. Smaller, more efficient, more focused. It finished construction after the war had ended, and mostly dealt with materials research, hyperspace developments and Remnants investigation. The hyperspace sensor array of the Starprism, or at least its distant ancestor, had probably been tested there at some point or another.

"Understood. There are schematics for experimental modules, but I assume those would have to wait."

"Low priority, yes. First, industry, then with what we can spare, the materials for a decoy outpost." Though she was going to focus hard on more advanced machinery, she actually had more basic material production than she could use for scaling up, at least if she wasn't building large machines like the colonial smelters. Not that the electronics fabricator was particularly tiny, but it wasn't a monster whose materials cost was eighty percent 'contain the literal molten metal we are busy heating up and molding'. At least she didn't have to worry about cooling systems. Actually... "Once it's done, we can also try it out on the stone. The way this mountains dissipates heat..."

"Anomalous."

"Indeed." Sapphiria frowned. "What worries me is if it's detectable by some of the systems downstairs, and where it's going. Magic seems to be able to do a lot...but not violate entropy." Mana decayed and was lost. Some of it even turned into something that then became heat, like all energy losses. In this way at least, it was disturbingly normal. "If it abruptly stops working because we overloaded the heatsinks, things could get complicated."

"Perhaps the heat absorption will drop in effectiveness if that is to happen, before total failure."

"Maybe. But it'll be worth looking into. If nothing else, replicating the effect for our energy weapons..."

The simulacrum nodded.

"A tremendous increase in portability and effectiveness, even if only by having highly effective heat transmission."

"Exactly. Alright." She looked as the last of the several minecarts that followed hers came to a halt in what had once been just a small area set aside for transport, but was now becoming a miniature cargo train station. "Get the salvage unloaded. Scan it once we're done with the monster samples, and get it recycled. We can handle the decoy while we wait."

"Understood." Robotic arms began to unload the minecarts. Nowadays she had more effective methods than grabbing the items and depositing them, notably a mechanism that lifted the minecarts then simply overturned them, tipping their contents into a hopper, but she'd rather not damage any of the salvage anymore than she had to until they were scanned. Afterwards, well, they were just refined materials to use. "Shall we go to the simulation?"

Sapphiria sat down, her back to the pod. She should probably make a chair or something.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

"Let's." Said the AI, internally rolling her eyes at the program. "We have much to do."

*****

"-the Bane fell back after the shielding barges were damaged." Said the lieutenant, and captain Gerard nodded.

"They were simply testing us." The older officer straightened up, and looked at the men and women of his team, assembled in the command tent. Some were new, reinforcements and replacements in this hellish war. Others he'd dragged halfway across the world, in the name of King and Country. "Making sure our defenses hadn't slackened."

Fortunately, that wasn't likely to happen. Secondary as this battlefront was, guarding the Iceborn river north of Exacor from a crossing by the Bane, it was nonetheless vital, and the generals overseeing the defense of the fortress city weren't about to neglect it. Not when it would enable an encirclement of the beleaguered city.

"We're lucky, honestly." Said another one of the lieutenant, a woman who looked far too old for her actual age. "The river remains warmer than it should. We should have started getting ice solid enough to walk on by now."

"Praise the Ancestors for small miracles..." Muttered one of the NCOs, and Gerard smiled.

"I prefer to praise our luck, but that works too." He turned towards the sergeant, who was on his side of the desk. No one batted an eye, not even the lieutenant, for an NCO to be the captain's right hand man. "Our people on the other side?"

"They've been pushed back. The Bane started sweeping more actively after the last breakout to get the message across."

"Damn. Any news from the main lines?"

One of the few enlisted in the group, a courier, shrugged.

"The dance continues. The undead press their attacks, but the main assault has yet to begin. There have, however, been more and more signs of troops being diverted instead of massed for attack."

Heading towards the valley, no doubt, Gerard grimaced.

"Well, it is something. We-"

The tent flap opened, and a guard poked his head in.

"My apologies, captain. There is a Ser Longecote here to see you?"

The soldiers exchanged furtive glances. The nobility showing up uninvited and effectively unannounced to a military camp was seldom good news.

Which was why they were barely able to contain their astonishment as Gerard gave the guard a broad smile.

"Ah, good! Show him to my tent, would you? I'll be just a minute."

"Yes sir!"

Gerard's smile turned the slightest bit impish at the expressions of his people. Except the sergeant, of course, who knew.

"He is...a friend. And working with me on a special project." He need not say anything more. 'Special projects' was an excellent euphemism for 'do not ask, and you cannot be called to testify before a court of law'. Even the new replacements had learned enough to not dig any further. "Let's carry on. How are our food stores?"