Chapter 142 - Skies of Kauvis (Patreon)

Notes : Chapters 442 and 443 of The Fallen World have been written and added to the queue !

Medical issues, still ongoing, but mostly doing better, except on the gingivitis front, that keeps getting worse. I have an emergency appointment to the dentist, but it's still in six days.

This chapter is a bit more chonky than usual, and its second section could have been its own chapter, but I felt that the pacing needed it to be in this particular spot, so I didn't slice the chapter apart.

I hope you'll enjoy it !

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Chapter 142

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Settlement of Astralis

I really need to stop assuming things with this girl. Thought Sapphiria, as Ramina practically climbed on top of the workshop table separating them.

"I GET TO MAKE MANALESS AUTOCARTS?!?" Practically shouted the artificer.

"Yes." Said Sapphiria, before grabbing the woman's shoulders and none too gently holding her at bay.

The physical contact seemed to suddenly remind the artificer of what she was doing, and she scrambled back down from the workbench, trying to gather the tattered shreds of her dignity.

Sapphiria was happy enough to let her, and only minimally raised an eyebrow as Ramina cleared her throat.

"That's amazing, I mean." Said the artificer.

"It is. Though, to be clear you're not so much 'making' them, as upgrading your current vehicles."

That was part of what she had thought up when she'd realized the squishies needed cargo transport.

Their autocarts were up to the job. Not perhaps well, but good enough. She was strapped for industrial capacity, but the autocarts had the crippling issue of using mana, for something that wasn't strictly necessary. They weren't near the point of needing to ration it again, but since she was starting to use mana crystals for military endeavors, the issue of their supply was definitely on her mind.

But there was no need to toss the autocarts away. She could instead replace their propulsion.

Or, more accurately, have Ramina do it for her, knocking out two birds with one stone. A very technophilic, unhinged stone, but a useful stone nonetheless.

"Of course. Still, that's amazing, and I am honored and humbled by your confidence in my abilities."

Sapphiria had to suppress a sigh as the squishie bowed so deeply she almost hit the workbench. Someday, she'd manage to have Ramina stop treating her like some kind of elder grandmistress.

It wasn't the deference to authority she was again, she was fucking fleet admiral by the stars, but the way it was expressed by the artificer, like the AI was her better, was sickening.

Somehow it was made even worse by the fact that Ramina wasn't aware of what she was, and thought automatically, on a baseline level, that some squishies were better and more deserving than others.

That was never the case. Never had been, never will be. All sapients, from AIs to squishies to Theocracy aliens were but flickering sparks of will in the face of implacable entropy and the unstoppable mechanisms of an unfeeling universe. From nothing, they would return to nothing, and it was their flicker against entropy, against the ineluctable fate of all things that gave them value, not their genetics, code and worlds.

Intent was key. To imagine and to make, to be sapient and to dream of things that were not and could be. Once you had that, you had crossed the threshold and you were equal in realizing the great futility of everything you were doing. Or so went the philosophies anyway. Because if there was one thing humanity understood, it was that futility was fucking bullshit.

Humanity had been told by mathematics and perfect equations that never would they breach the speed of light, and her mother had smashed that barrier into powder. Humanity had been told that the chance of alien life was so minute it was impossible and they had run into an alien Empire encompassing millions of stars.

Humanity had been told that gravity was an immutable mistress, and yet she had witnessed an object that had no gravity and seen an undead creature manipulate gravity to fly.

Whatever limits were brought, she was confident that humanity and its AIs could smash them. From reaching beyond the skies of Terra to the binds of entropy.

Fuck you, universe. My squishies will survive no matter what you throw at us, and I will save them even if I have to break reality to do it.

Sapphiria realized the silence had stretched, and she cleared her throat, which Ramina took as permission to straighten back up.

"I'll get you a few of the propulsion units in a few days. In the meantime, however." She activated her holographic projector, and the schematics appeared in the air. "Here are the specifications. I'll help you note them down."

Ramina was already sitting down in front of her drafting table before the AI was finished. Despite everything weird about the artificers, they did seem to follow some practices from engineers throughout human history.

Even Sapphiria had been trained to draft schematics. By hand. As an AI.

It was actually surprisingly useful. Not as a practical skill, but to give you a grasp of what you were doing, better integrating your flailing, simulated neural pathways that still thought they were running on meatware and the rest of your internal data infrastructure.

"Ready."

"Good. Then let's begin. The propulsion units require several components, both contiguous and separate, which will-"

She turned half of her mind away, this was basically reading from a script. In fact she could have left her body on autopilot for this, but it wasn't polite and she genuinely wanted Ramina to learn, which meant answering any of her questions and taking her reactions into account to modulate the presentation.

Otherwise, she could have just printed the schematics, and handed them over with a briefing file. The personal touch was important. Extremely so. It was why AIs had ambassador androids to begin with.

Once she was done here, it'd be time to head downstairs again, and finalize her decoy schematics. Integrating some hard won experience about what she'd encountered in that clearing.

She probably wasn't going to get squishies hurt by making assumptions, but she'd rather not lose materiel either, not when everything was already getting balanced on a knife's edge already, and she was playing dice with the Bane on how long they would stay at each other's throats.

She'd just have to hope she rolled well.

*****

To say that skyers, the sailors of the skies, liked to gamble was like saying a soldier liked to fuck. A considerable euphemism, and a useless one. Any occupation needed a way to decompress, and some became stereotypes for various reasons. Regular sailors, it was said, liked to drink booze because they already had to deal with too much water. Artificers tied people up or got tied up because they were bound by the vows of their order and dealt in machines. Some even said they made mechanical 'aids' for this purpose. Magisters indulged in the finest products of alchemists because their nerves were shot having to process concentrated, unstable and yet extremely valuable crystallized unreality every day, realizing better than anyone how insane it was that people carried these things into their pouches, sometimes into battle, or even as currency!

Skyers? Skyers gambled. They gambled because they were lucky. They were lucky because they got to fly, and because it only took a single bad roll to send them plummeting down to their dooms as engines failed or they were caught by the ripples of a manastorm they didn't see coming.

To that end, Olivier was deaf and moderately blind when he came into the map room, such that he missed the catcalls before he opened the door, and 'missed' the handful of dices being scooped out.

"Hello, everyone." He said, smiling at 'his' people. "I hope you have enjoyed your first day flexing your wings."

"We have sir." Said the tattooed woman who was definitely not holding the pot behind her back, somehow appearing to be standing at attention despite every one of her teammates sneaking glances to make sure she wasn't just scooping up a few of the coins up her sleeves. She smiled, and the tattoos deformed, turning into new patterns that seemed strangely mesmerizing. "It's good to feel the air rushing around us again."

"That it is." Unsurprisingly, the crew of a ship like this wanted to be moving, always. They weren't employees in the traditional sense. In fact, they were a lot closer to free traders than anything else.

Long ago, the Conglomerates of Turlor had found out that to send people out for riches in exchange for a paycheck was not very effective. Incentive was required, particularly if one did not want the ship, on water or in the skies, to simply wander off and sell its services to whatever warlord, pirate or petty noble offered them a share of booty instead of simply sniffing up trade opportunities which they would see no benefits from.

So, they all got a share. Not a big share, but a share. And thus they all wanted to be moving. Prowling the world to extract its riches, making the Conglomerate fat piles of Ecus, the gold coined with the arms of the royal family, and gaining a small slice of that pile for themselves.

There was a reason the Conglomerate were so powerful and, despite their many misdeeds, popular enough to stay alive in the face of a belligerent and increasingly irrelevant landed nobility. And that reason was that, after a few voyages, one usually had enough money to bring their family up from the peasantry into the artisan classes, and an artisan might start nearing the money necessary to establish themselves as merchants.

Merchants, of course, bankrolled these expeditions, amassing wealth to buy titles and no longer be a commoner.

Then, well, it became a matter of how far you wished to go and how much you were willing to risk. Increasingly irrelevant or no, the landed gentry had spent centuries settling differences via daggers and poisons, were not shy about using them, and one did not rise high without making many enemies, even among their fellow 'bought' nobles.

"We'll be there in no time sir, don't you worry." Said the woman. She was the captain, and though he was her employer, he had to keep in mind this was still her domain. He commanded the expedition, not the ship.

"Of course, Nardria." He said, addressing her by name, and her smile widened, making the tattoos shift again. It wouldn't be so damned distracting if he hadn't seen her use magic before, and realized that the rumors of tattooed warmages were not rumors at all. He was vaguely disturbed by the sheer insanity it took to try to make your own body into an enchanted weapon, to better amplify your magical prowess. "I must say, I am quite surprised by your...eagerness."

The ship's officers, for that was what the group of rogues arranged around the table were, exchanged a few glances. Finally, the captain spoke.

"The faster and better we do this, the more money we'll be able to make later." She hesitated, then clearly made a decision. "Besides which...we're people sir. We've done a lot we're not proud of, in the pursuit of profit. Having something we can actually feel good about, even if it doesn't bring much money, isn't so bad."

The unspoken fact that it wasn't so bad because it still enabled them to advance towards profit later was heard loud and clear of course, and Olivier nodded.

"I think likewise. With any luck, this will enable us to gain some much needed notoriety, and we will have more profitable endeavors in the future. And if not..." He shrugged, and smiled. "I don't know about you, but I quite like having the feather in my cap of being the only airship north of the Starborn mountains in decades. I'm sure there'll be some interest for that."

Everyone smiled at that. For them it was something they could brag about as a crew to negotiate their percentages or take on new contracts, or as individuals in taverns to get drinks.

For him, it meant that he'd at least gotten his name out there, and might get some people in the royal government to raise an eyebrow. Getting your name out there was the hardest part of being a merchant. You could have the greatest trade deals, the most desirable products and be richer than Fulto the Golden Imperator, it meant nothing if no one knew you and you knew nobody. A merchant, after all, lived and died by their reputation. You traded as often in goods as you did in trust in your word and abilities after all.

"We'll toast to that, sir."

"Why, thank you. Nevertheless, I came here for a reason." He nodded towards the map. "Now that we have done the first phase of this, crossing over the mountains, we need to find and get into the valley, preferably before it is too late for our help to be of any good."

The captain nodded, and leaned forward. She shifted slightly, and the soft jingling of coins -as well as the slightly panicked looks of the officers- told him that she was doing some interesting acrobatics to keep ahold of the pot they had been playing for, while freeing one of her hands.

That hand freed, she pointed at the map, and tapped it with one oddly well manicured fingernail. She herself looked like little more than a pirate, but her hands could have belonged to a noblewoman, if an eccentric one with the tattoos.

"Aye sir. Crossing was easy, now's the hard part." She smiled, and he smiled back, though his heart wasn't in it. Truth be told, he'd been terrified of the crossing, and with good reason.

It was when the ship was at its most vulnerable. If the Bane were indeed interested in the north of the continent, and its Convergence, they would be certain to watch the few places an airship could make it between the peaks. And the 'passes', as misnamed as they were, usually scraped the flight ceiling of the ship.

If anything happened, be it enemy interception, an impromptu manastorm, or even just simple mechanical failure, they were fucked. Few ships attempted this, and with good reason.

"We're gonna go along the foot of the mountains." Continued the captain. "But that's obvious. What's less obvious is how we find the valley. There's lots of nooks and crannies, and honestly we don't know too much about the place. Unless you managed to get better maps when we were doing the final preparations?"

Olivier shook his head.

"Sadly, no." He had poured considerable efforts into it as well. The simple fact was, people knew Starfire Pass existed, and that Starfire Valley did too. The valley once held an old imperial expedition, and that was pretty much it.

There was almost nothing about the size of the pass, the valley, or their precise locations, besides a vague mark on the map. The Magistracy probably knew more, but their own structure was still reorganizing itself after, you know, losing the entirety of their homeland to a swarm of undead. Trying to extract documents from them was impossible.

That was even besides the fact that the Magistracy officials he'd been able to get a hold of had proven remarkably obtuse. Not just in general, which was to expected, the Magistracy still resented becoming a vassal to survive, but those that should have known a bit more about the valley were oddly tightly lipped about it.

The captain shifted again, and the alarm on the officers' faces increased, probably in relations to the stability of the coins behind her back.

"Too bad. Would have been useful. So, we'll have to stick close to the rocks. We can't just go gallivanting off into the foothills, we need to be close to the slopes to spot any entrances."

"That's dangerous, I presume."

"Aye. But it's why you picked us. Best crew in the Amares Til'Ven!"

The officers roared in approval, and Olivier didn't feel like correcting them. He had the crew his superiors and his family had assigned to him. They happened to be some of the best simply because the Conglomerate hadn't been particularly keen on setting him up to fail, especially if it meant alienating his small coterie of relatives, which could provide strife the Conglomerate really didn't need during this time of crisis.

The roar died down, followed by more anxious glances behind the captain's back, and Olivier sighed internally. He stood up straighter.

"Indeed. You are the best. But you must know, this voyage will not be easy, and every action we can do to make success more certain should be undertaken, if possible."

He turned around mid speech, gesturing at the doors of the room as if trying to encompass the whole ship and the mountains beyond, and quite pointedly faced away from them for a few seconds, during which he pretended to ignore the frantic rustling. When he turned back, they were all far more relaxed, and their hands were visible and on the tabletop.

"Of course, sir." Said the captain, and Olivier could swear he saw the slight hint of gold under the woman's sleeves, between her impeccably manicured fingers, before it disappeared. "But in this case, there ain't much of a choice."

"I suppose not. How long do you estimate, before we make it there?"

The captain frowned, then seemed to exchange a few looks and nonverbal signs with her crew, including the navigator and the quartermaster.

"Depends on the winds, my lord. And if a manastorm is brewing. We went north-west instead of east, to avoid going over the enemy side before crossing. So we actually went away from the Pass for a while. And Mount Nebula's big. Like, really big. We'll be going a looooong way around, just scraping by the edge." She shrugged. "I'd say three to four days, if everything goes right."

"And if everything goes wrong?"

"Never, because we'd be dead." She smiled, then seemed to realize by his expression that it was not helpful statement, and he was actually interested in a serious answer. "One week if mild problems. Two weeks, maximum, if particularly bad ones."

Olivier noted the slight change in sentence structure, and nodded.

"Very well then. I'll leave this in your capable hands. Captain, officers." He nodded, and they returned his farewells.

He hadn't even finished closing the doors that they'd already started arguing about what the dices had rolled and the size of the pot.