Chapter 143 - Decoy (Patreon)

Notes : Chapters 444 and 445 of The Fallen World have been written and added to the queue !

I'm seriously considering upping the schedule, the only issue is that I have a ton of medical crap next week, including a lot of 'hey look, you have to wear this shitty, bulky medical equipment that prevents you from sleeping or resting in any way for days', which is probably going to drive me completely nuts.

So, for now, sticking to the slower schedule. After next week, we'll see.

I hope you'll enjoy the chapter !

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Chapter 143

Starborn Mountains, Mount Nebula

Crash Site

"Status report." Said Sapphiria, as Cia popped up in the simulation.

"The electronics fabricator is nearing completion. The first part for ancillary systems are being produced."

The AI nodded. The electronics 'fabricator' was a bit of a misnomer. It wasn't, strictly speaking, an actual fabricator. As in it couldn't just take raw materials and spit out a finished, ready to use part.

Instead it was kind of like...a primary processing node, readying materials for more specialized processes. Sometimes even receiving parts back to be processed again.

So it was more a miniature factory, if nothing else.

There were a lot of reasons for that design. Mostly it was that 'true' fabricators were just very inefficient in every respect besides mass and flexibility. That included cost.

Overall, it made more sense to build it like this, even for naval vessels. The only exception were things like her escape pod, which needed mass and volume efficiency above everything else.

Truth be told, they should probably be calling it an electronics plant. She made a note of that, before the damned program could chime in.

"Is your work progressing at a satisfactory pace?" Asked the simulacrum, and the AI nodded. Then she looked up at Cia.

The AI sighed, internally. Cia could technically just check on the progress of the schematics herself. This was gentle prodding. Also, the simulacrum had both proven to have excellent, if somewhat straightforward feedback, and honestly the admiral owed her something more than a nod and a grunt. Hell, she hadn't even grunted.

"It has. Wish to take a look?"

"By all means."

Sapphiria flung her hand out, and the three dimensional plans for the decoy appeared in the air.

Her little blank simulation, which she had used to start figuring out things about magic, was coming ever more handy. It helped to focus, sometimes, to just shut out everything else.

...Which might be what was getting the simulacrum worried. AIs that did that too much tended to retreat inside their minds, ever deeper into simulations until reality became a distant and annoying dream.

Was that why Cia seemed to be teasing her about Kalia? Trying to make sure she was reminded of her girlfriend?

There was no need. She was, after all, Arcadia's daughter. Not thinking about her loved ones was basically physically impossible for her. The need to protect, to love, was deeply ingrained inside her mind it could devolve into outright psychosis if she wasn't careful.

"This seems...a bit dispersed." Said the simulacrum, as she gazed at the schematics.

"My little fight made me realize that if monsters can use magic, they most certainly can deploy area of effect attacks. That's not too much of a problem elsewhere, but here, with limited resources to build up, spreading out a bit felt...prudent."

Cia nodded.

"I understand. There seems to be a fair few autocannons, proportionally."

"That's by design. They've been extremely effective against monsters so far." Extremely effective against everything, actually. They were just a royal pain in the ass to move around and thus had to either be mounted on a vehicle or used as static defense. Making an autocannon team was doable, but she'd have to modify the design, the mobility would be basically zero, and the ammunition would be...limited. It just wasn't worth it right now. Once she was done scaling up though...worth another look, certainly.

"They will be a significant cost."

"About that..." Sapphiria tapped the air, and a representation of Starfire Pass appeared, her various units highlighted in green, the Hand's in purple. "I was focused on getting the armor, weapons and talismans salvaged. Mostly to deny them to the Hand, in case he decided to pick some up like he did after the battle of Myrtran. But the rolling fortress is still there. The chassis is completely fucked, but the guns should be salvageable. We can even take a crack at the bone tyrant while we're at it."

"Would that cause a response?"

Sapphiria sighed.

"And that, my dear, is why I haven't touched it yet." Despite the fact that, as far as she could tell, the bone tyrant's weapons had some kind of gravity enchantment. It was unlikely to be active. Hell, it might even no longer be functional in any way to be useful. Enchantments could absolutely be damaged by physical attacks upon their vessel, and she'd unleashed all kinds of hell on the tyrant. But still, gravity manipulation.

The problem was, of course, that like the Nineteenth going to try and salvage the battlefield had elicited a reaction from the Hand, and would definitely have gotten a reaction from her had they gone for the rolling fortress, they might pounce if she started taking apart their big, bad undead mech thing.

"...Should I make preparations?"

Sapphiria sighed.

On the one hand, holy shit, artificial gravity. On the other, she had squishies to keep safe, and for that she desperately needed to keep the Nineteenth thinking they could negotiate a settlement, for as long as physically possible.

"Make plans, but don't divert resources. I'll shelve that for later. Getting the autocannons and anything else out of the rolling fortress is the absolute priority."

"Yes ma'am. I will comply." The simulacrum vanished.

Sapphiria sighed, then went back to work.

*****

The AI laid down on the floor of her simulation, and groaned as the schematics lazily spun around her.

With the decoy schematics done, she'd taken the time to review every other defensive installation she had. Not to reinforce right now, she didn't have the resources to spare, but mostly in the future. Plus, taking a look at them had helped her seem some flaws in her decoy plans, and adjust accordingly. It wasn't much, but every little bit counted sometimes.

The tunnel entrance was more or less perfect as it was. Maybe a couple of autocannons, but that was it. It was fortified, the squishies could retreat into the tunnels, it didn't really need that much firepower when you had a position this good.

Astralis...well the entire point of the decoy was to lessen its defensive load, so the current grid should be able to hold up more than fine.

The artillery outpost had been a bit more tricky. She wanted to be able to expand it, but at the same time she couldn't afford a large fortification. In the end, she'd settled on a few towers, that would serve as backups to the main one, but would be less tall and their primary roles would be to serve as gun emplacements to rain fire on incoming hostiles. With the pillboxes already in place, it should give her a fair amount of flexibility without going overboard

As for the Pass...Sapphiria wasn't entire sure what to do here. She'd implied that she didn't want to give the Hand too much negotiating power and that was true. But she also needed to strengthen the defenses at some point. Even if only to be safe.

The issue was, the damage as extensive, and even if it wasn't a simple wall wasn't going to cut it, as was amply demonstrated by their near defeat. She needed bunkers, pillboxes and cost-effective autoturrets.

A project of that scale would require her construction bots however, and there was no telling how the Hand or the Nineteenth would react to them when the squishies in Astralis were already weirded out by them.

Plus, turrets meant colonial batteries and regular maintenance. She could trust the Hand to some level, but there was a difference between 'fighting together' and 'stationing your maintenance bots and servicing some of your most important hardware in front of the enemy'. She could hide most of it from the Nineteenth with bunkers and other fortifications, but not the Hand. The more she saw of them and their Dominion as well, the more concern she had.

They were planning for the long term. It's what they had always done according to the files she got, and they were applying it here. To her and the negotiations. The problem is that she didn't have a clue what they would do, because she had no idea what structure they were evolving into.

The archive had some...very biased explanations on how the Empire divided itself internally, on a political level. Factions, named after precious or semi-precious stones and minerals, formed in the Senate and generally behaved like a strange mix of what she would consider standard political parties and feudal nobles. Kind of like planetary governments in the Federation, they had their own private forces, but unlike the Federation, those were part of the greater whole. Of the Imperial military. Sure there were local militias, but legions fell under the command of certain factions.

The Empire seemed to have distributed military control that way. It seemed remarkably stupid to her, but until the Age of Fury it appeared to have worked. Deeply established, old factions basically had ancestral legions they got to give commanders, and new ones could rise through military command and conquest.

One of the key things holding it together were the Emperors and the Dominions. Emperors were above the petty political melee. There was no election or political wrangling or anything. Not even wars of succession until the Age of Fury. The Emperor appointed an heir, as well as a secret list of backups, almost always retired before expiring, and the heir took over. The second someone was appointed as heir, they shed all faction affiliations. Hard to tell if it was real or theater since the Magistracy was supposed to do the same thing and thus extolled that 'virtue' to hell and back in its records, but still.

The Emperor then managed the factions by appointing Dominions and Legates from them. Giving them offices, power, but always leading back to the Throne. In turn, Dominions and legates appointed Hands and officers. Sometimes within their own faction, sometimes to others to make alliances or fulfill deals.

It had originally just been about splitting military command, but then appeared to have evolved into...not exactly governships à la Republican Rome, more something akin to the Diocletian Tetrarchy, where Dominions weren't just there to back the Emperor, but also acted as an extension of the Throne and effectively subordinate rulers running their own little chunk of the Empire more effectively than it could be ruled from afar. What was interesting was that there had never been a region permanently assigned to a faction. No 'home territory' to grow a power base and a pocket kingdom. Dominions always had different territories from their predecessors and the local civil government very specifically changed whenever a Dominion retired, and was rejuvenated to report in to the City of Spires and the Eternal Throne directly again. She wasn't sure if 'reporting to the Eternal Throne' in the texts was meant as a metaphor for the ruler of the Empire or they actually did that, as it appeared to have become an expression being copied and pasted all along the historical record, and she didn't have enough documents to trace it back to its point of origin to find out.

This kept the local governments from completely ossifying into stagnant bureaucracies, which was no small feat. In fact, the entire Imperial system, from the Emperor all the way down to military officers, seemed to emphasize timely retirement and not just sitting your ass into your job until you died. Furthermore, there were extreme proscriptions against undead holding their roles for extended periods of time. If you were a Risen, you retired like everybody else. Shoo, go find something else to do with your undying eternity, no holding a councilship or a legate commission for over fifty years. The Emperor went a bit further, in that no undead could sit on the Throne. Period. Doing so was...well, the closest thing to 'heresy' a functionally secular but still sort of deifying-slash-mystifying the Throne government had.

The official reasoning was that it would prevent an undead from just taking over and sit on the throne forever, and Kallaran himself had refused to be raised from the dead specifically to avoid that particular scenario, a tradition that had carried to every Emperor and the vast majority of the Dominions and Hands thereafter, following in his footsteps. Which explained why so many were available to return when the Bane awakened.

The unofficial reason, she was sure, was that the neural interface on the Throne wouldn't be able to connect to anything but a living human. Clearly, even if Kallaran knew he could modify it to work with undead he wasn't certain about the result, and if as she presumed he was a survivor of whatever had kicked civilization down here, he probably didn't even know where to start.

Hell. She had an advanced materials refinery, a fabricator, an atomic level processing core, and a full library core, all three the best or close to the best the Federation could offer, and she wouldn't even know where to start.

Granted, Kallaran presumably knew a lot more about the undead than she did, but he had no industry and the best materials of his era were bronze and primitive ceramics.

Regardless, the Imperial internal power system was fascinating. It was...well, it was blatant favor trading and at some level, the Empire had literally institutionalized corruption. But it appeared to have worked.

Until there was no more Throne to keep the different Factions in check. Which she was guessing was what was happening now. They had a ruler. An Imperator or Imperatrix. But they didn't have the Throne or at least the authority derived from it.

What a mess.

She sat up as she received a ping. Her holograms vanished, replaced by one the pass.

Speak of the devil...