Chapter 442 - The Nuclear Option (Patreon)

Notes : Chapter 447 has been written and added to the queue !

First chapter written using the more agile format. Worked like a charm ! At least I believe so, you'll be able to see for yourself once 447 is out.

I'm a bit worried at how patreon is trying to turn into some kind of social media site, with these new 'quips' and constant features trying to turn it into twitter. Seriously, what the heck is wrong with these guys ?

Anyway, most of the really problematical medical stuff is done. Now waiting for the results. Still more appointments to come but at least they shouldn't be strapping a tons of machines onto me.

Also had the surprise of someone telling me they're anticipating the next chapter of the Battletech fanfic more than a new TFW chapter. That was unexpected, to say the least, but good to know I didn't do badly XD

I hope you'll enjoy the chapter ! (Though given how it starts, you might wish to re-read chapter 441, it has been a while, but in the book they'll just follow up each other, so I can't put a reminder at the start).

Chapter 442

Red Sands Desert, Aurorean Empire

Dungeon Factory, Command Center

There was a long, drawn out silence after that particular declaration.

It wasn't a very comfortable thought, to say the least.

The worst part however?

Nobody could find anything to retort. Not even Alexandra.

"...So what do we do?" Asked Pyn.

Alexandra and Ghost shared a look.

"We prepare." Said Alexandra.

"Thoroughly." Added Ghost.

"Sometimes you girls really feel like twins." Allya smiled at them both. They relaxed. She was tense, sure, but she seemed confident in them, which seemed sincere. "If anyone can take on the Church, and you know, the Custodians, it's you. So what can you do to pull through? I'm assuming you've already given it some thought."

Alexandra shrugged.

"Our main thought for now was primarily survival through discretion. We can't take the Church, or just the Citadel, in a stand up fight. Not even in a skewed fight, yet."

"But you were expecting to have to fight them?"

"It was assumed to be inevitable. Moreso now." The dungeon core flicked a glance at the apparition, who nodded.

"I agree. If they want us to be their next 'purge', eventually they'll trigger the berserker protocols. They won't even need to kill Emilia to justify it, we've already done so much damage it won't take much to portray us as snapping. Might even frame it as trying to take over the Empire."

Allya snorted.

"You already own it."

"Not officially." Countered Ghost. "And especially not publicly. The Church is probably aware our hands are so far up your ass you can't walk straight." Allya blushed at the crude metaphor, but no one else even blinked. "This is all theater for the public anyway. They seem keen on that. We know they've been justifying some of the nuclear and orbital strikes. Despite the fact that they presumably were for their war against the Order. They could have just declared they were fighting heretics, but seem reluctant to do so."

"Because they're not that popular." Said Pyn, softly, and the elf shrugged as everyone looked at her. "I mean, outside of the temples, with their priests and guards, there isn't really...devotion all that much. Gorromar's pretty devout, but most people don't really care all that much about heresy and things."

"Pyn's right." Said Allya. "Plus, with everything that has happened lately, people might start asking questions if the Church was suddenly in a war against heretics. Especially one where they have to blow up city blocks."

Alexandra nodded. It was interesting that the Church hadn't pushed harder to control everything. They were clearly operating under parameters they could only grasp at, some of which seemed downright weird for a genocidal, extremely aggressive religious military.

Though, her perspective was skewed. The closest thing to religious zealots she'd encountered were on Europa, and it was secular, just with adherence so absolute to an ideology it might as well have been a religion. She had, however, read a fair bit on how extremist religious groups had gone off the rails and partially caused the Terran Hegemony War. 'Subtlety' and 'public opinion' hadn't really mattered when nukes were flying.

"So they're being careful and sneaky." Said the dungeon core. "Which right now works to our advantage. But eventually they will try to send that code, and when they realize it isn't working, they'll bomb us from orbit. At that point, we will be a genuine threat to them and it's not like Old World nukes haven't been used on Rebirth before."

In fact the city had been nuked twice, almost thrice with the guild rigging the reactors to blow for their little sand kraken trick. Even Brussels had only been bombed once -albeit very thoroughly-, though that presumed Arcadia hadn't reduced it to ash after what happened.

"And you have a solution?" Asked Allya, hopefully, not too obtrusively hugging Pyn and trying to comfort her.

"Yes. We have copies of the energy shields from the Flickerlight," Allya had laughed outright when she was told they'd acquired the ship below Darthar, "as well as developed some methods for deflecting kinetic bombardment. We're also working on ways to doing the same to their hyperspace guns."

"But?"

Alexandra sighed.

"But just surviving isn't going to work. We have the schematics for some naval weapons..."

"Which would work if we could openly build a Planetary Defence Center, match the Citadel's tonnage, and then could afford the collateral damage of a slugging match between a space fortress and a ground fortress." Said Ghost.

"Precisely." Completed Alexandra. "Most likely, the Church will try a limited strike first. If that fails, they'll throw everything they've got at us. Simply put, we can't hide anything that could survive that, and even if we could, the collateral damage would at the very least completely destroy the trade route, and quite possibly just wipe out half the continent. Their main guns are so large I think they could genuinely start threatening the structural integrity of the world's crust. Even if we could absorb the shots with energy shields, we'd literally be hammered down into the planet like a nail."

"Ah. And you don't have like...some kind of dagger or equivalent for stabbing past their armor quickly, and go for the jugular?"

Alexandra shook her head.

"It's more complicated than that in space warfare. Any weapon that can be shot down will fail, because of their spatial compression shield. Even if they didn't detect anything coming in -and if the Order can compromise our stealth technology, the Church almost certainly can too-, they're almost certain to see it once it enters the bubble around the Citadel. Their point defense guns are so advanced we don't even understand how they could possibly work, and they hit so hard they can be used to bomb the planet. They don't even need to know where incoming missiles are, their area of effect, from what we saw at least, is large enough they can just do a wall of fire." She was starting to pace now, in her element. It had been so long since she'd gotten to do proper space tactics, it felt almost refreshing. "Sure, there's standoff packages for missiles, but I still believe they'll be detected long before they get into range. That leaves direct fire weapons. But we'd need extremely powerful, and thus expensive and hard to hide ones, and a lot of them." She shrugged. "Plus, they're all designed for prolonged engagements. Missile pods are made to be the single shot 'hail mary' weapons. Every ship and every weapon they use outside of that are made to keep firing for a long fight. Even PDCs expect to see their enemy coming and stay alive long enough to fire many volleys. Our best bet would be railguns. A lot of them. Preferably planetary defense ones, and then one massive alpha strike. Er, a first, overwhelming volley that precludes any retaliation. But building that would be far beyond our capabilities. Cheap, one shot railguns don't exist. Moreover, I'm not sure we could develop one that would save enough on costs to be meaningful."

Ghost nodded along.

"There's some, err...interesting options for one shot weapons on the ground." Said the apparition. "But they can't really be aimed."

"What kind of options?" Asked the Empress.

"Well, you can dig a hole, put a nuke at the bottom, then put a giant wad of metal and fire it like a giant gun."

That seemed to stun the former assassin for a couple seconds.

"Does that...work."

"Yes." Answered Alexandra. "Humanity accidentally did it during a nuclear test, a long time ago. The 'bullet', so to speak, was found past the orbit of Neptune during the campaign against the Outer System Republic after the Arcstar attack." She hesitated as she saw the blank look from the Empress. "I'll...explain later. But the problem is, you need to bury it deep so the energy has nowhere else to go. You can't really aim it. And if they start bombarding us, I'm going to guess they'll at least try to dodge a little bit." That much was a safe bet as any. The crippling weakness of any static installation was long range kinetic bombardment. "So it'd only be useful if we struck first, before they did anything at all. I'd rather not bet on that. Though we could use more compact, bomb fed lasers. Basically detonate a nuke, feed it through special laser rods, bam, instant high powered laser cannon. And unlike with a missile, that has size limitations, we can make the bomb really powerful and give it large, well calibrated rods, allowing it to deal meaningful damage at a good distance. The atmosphere will be a problem and the collateral damage will be absolutely horrendous but...it is possible."

"Well...it's better than nothing? Good luck making nukes though."

Alexandra, Emilia and Ghost exchanged a look.

"...You're kidding, right?" Said Allya, while Pyn giggled. There was an edge of hysteria in her voice, but most of it appeared genuine. Trira, who had simply faded into the background and kept quiet, snickered as well.

"Depends on what you define as 'kidding'." Finally said Alexandra, after letting the silence hang for a second.

"...Show me."

*****

"Holy shit. Holy shit." Whispered Allya in pure awe as she ran her hands along the nuke.

It didn't look like much. But then again, that was part of the point. Having them be as generic as possible would help if images of them were captured before use. As such, they were patterned after the Sagitarius Empire's own warheads. They didn't have the schematics for them, but they did know what they were supposed to look like, mostly from archived footage. Some training material, but mostly propaganda videos, interestingly enough. The only decorations were a small series of labels, including the old reliable 'DANGER: RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS' and one that point blank announced that any unauthorized personnel manipulating, touching or even getting near it would be summarily executed.

According to Seraph's archives, that last part wasn't actually enforced unless you were particularly stupid about it, but it set the tone for how tense things were back then, and how terrified the Sagitarius Empire had been of sabotage.

"One hundred kiloton yield, fission implosion assembly." Said Ghost. She was proud, and had every right to be, the nukes they had were her babies.

"How many?" Allya didn't need to ask about what the yield meant, Alexandra had explained the yield of the nukes that had hit Rebirth to her. In fact, she probably could visualize it better than almost anybody, since she had, in fact, been nuked. Twice. And had to deal with the cleanup afterwards.

"Two fully assembled. Third has the materials ready, but we were looking at converting it into the trigger for a fusion bomb."

"I'm surprised you seem so happy to touch them." Commented Alexandra. "Aren't they supposed to be...unholy?"

Allya nodded.

"They are. This is the fire of the Old World the edicts spoke about." She shook her head. "For you, this is basically mundane. I don't even want to guess at how many you've seen. They were your weapons for your spaceships. For me, this is the weapons of Gods...and those who fought them. Plus, who isn't fascinating with unholy stuff, just a little bit?"

"That's fair." The dungeon core flicked a glance at Pyn. "You don't seem impressed."

The elf shrugged.

"I think I just expected...more? It's just a cylinder. A big cylinder sure, but just a cylinder."

"So are your strapons honey, and they're fearsome enough." Said Allya.

The power of speech seemed to desert the elf, and Alexandra stepped in.

"So yeah. We can make nukes. Not many, and not very quickly. Plus, the second we use one..."

"All hell breaks loose. Unless you can blame it on the Order." Said Allya, and Alexandra nodded. The Empress hadn't even needed to have it explained to her.

"Exactly."

"Well...at least it gives us a chance against the Church. Too bad we can't just nuke the UDC and be done with it."

"Trust me, we've had this discussion." Alongside some...other places they'd considered nuking. Better not bring up what almost happened to Darthar right now. "Ultimately it's better to have them in case, but we'd rather not use them unless as an absolute last resort. Even if we can blame the detonation on someone else."

The Empress nodded.

"I suppose so. Still, I can't help but wish we could just..." She snapped her fingers. "Boom. Problem solved."

"I'm sure the people who began the Great Night thought the same thing."

Emilia's words rang out in the room. No one had anything to retort.