Notes : Chapter 129 has been written and added to the queue !
Cleaning up the painting stuff today, hopefully I won't have more disruptions in the forseeable future but...yeah. We all know how the last few weeks have gone.
In any case, I'll be looking to writing more TFW again now that I'm not ticking like I'm about to snap something in half.
Also, I have the review copies for Book 2 of MFR, I'll have the post about them out tomorrow, for those interested !
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Chapter 126
Starborn Mountains, Mount Nebula
Crash Site
"Home sweet home!" Said Sapphiria as she leapt out of the minecart.
Or, more accurately, started her leap, yelped as she was assailed by a cascade of error messages, and flopping miserably onto the smooth floor as her leg gave out.
"We must stop meeting like this." Said Cia, and Sapphiria looked up to see the slight but definite expression of smugness on the simulacrum's face.
"Ah ah. Very funny." She winced as she stood up, and winced again as more minecarts came to a halt, filled to the brim with scrapped and damaged bots. "Though I'd admit, I would like to not come home from a major battle with most of my force wrecked."
"Better dead bots than dead colonists."
Sapphiria sighed.
"Agreed." She reviewed the error reports from her legs, and sighed. "Get the fabricator ready to repair me and my armor, then we can start working on the bots."
The escape pod hissed as the fabricator chamber opened.
"Already done. You may step in when ready."
Sapphiria's eyebrow rose, but she didn't comment. Just because the simulacrum didn't have creativity didn't meant she couldn't have initiative.
Plus...her coming home with holes in at least her armor was a pretty common occurrence lately.
Speaking of. She shut down her armor, and began stripping it off.
"Alright. I'll review some things while we do the repairs. Prepare a battle report. And...Have you finished digitalizing the documents Teman gave us?" Malry's brother had handed over a pile of books, treatises and others that portended to the Eternal Empire, but she just hadn't had the time to go through it all. AIs still had many of the inherent weaknesses of squishie neural networks in their design, notably the difference between what was in the databanks and what she remembered. She could inload data, have it pop up in a search, but she wouldn't 'know' it.
"Affirmative. They are ready for review."
"Good." As she finished doffing the armor -she'd gotten faster at it, which she would love to attribute to training, and not Kalia doing all sorts of stuff while she tried to get the rest off-, she also grabbed a pouch. "Put this in hazardous material quarantine, in the lab module. It's a gift from the Hand."
"Weapons?"
"Enchanted totems. We're going to dissect them down to the atomic level."
"I will prepare the laboratory."
Sapphiria sighed, leaning against the pod, before sliding into the fabricator. It felt like
"Good. Let's start with the report then."
*****
The battle analysis was complex and yet very simple. Magic created a lot of tactics and edge cases but it also didn't override firepower or combat protocols. If you shot a mage with enough energy, or while their defenses were down, they folded. It was kind of interesting how magic seemed to have followed the same path as space warfare, where offensive energy output had massively outscaled defensive measures. Yes, they had arcane energy shields, but much like molecular armor, those barriers failed eventually, and given what she'd seen and done, remarkably quickly if under specialized attacks.
The difference was that, in space, you had massive distances and a lot of room to maneuver, do deception through electronic warfare, and dodge.
The other side had tried deception before, with their illusions, but it had failed. And they'd tried maneuvers with their leap attacks and grappling hooks.
They couldn't dodge because of the confines of the pass itself. But she should probably keep it in mind for the future. Starfire Pass was pretty much ideal defensive conditions. Well, besides Sol where the Federation had turned the Sun into a weapon of war. The solar array that fed the immense industry of humanity's home system could be channeled into the Archer platforms, and once you did...
Half of the entire Navy could have assaulted Sol and half of the Navy would have died. After the Theocracy's discovery and the precarious first decades of the war, her mom was done taking chances.
In any case, once she started going beyond the valley, and she would, they'd start pulling out a lot more of the playbook. Even something as simple as cavalry could change a lot.
In terms of how her units had behaved, the junkbots had been within expected parameters. The problem were the machinegun teams. Even under substantial cover they'd taken a lot of heat and they were far too vulnerable for how much of her combat power they represented. Especially against armored foes, or those using these hellish shields. She should make a note to salvage what she could from the battlefield, maybe she could use them for armor plating or just as mobile cover for the machineguns.
TO-DO LIST UPDATED
She mentally flicked the notification away. Shoo, annoying program. I shall not waste anger on you when I'm elated I kept the squishies alive.
The shredderbots had behaved amazingly well. They could handle an insane amount of punishment...right up until their mana was depleted or the crystals were damaged.
Part of that was that they hadn't really been targeted with powerful attacks, and their sheer armor mass worked well with the way the enchantments spread and dispersed energy. There was simply so much of it to spread to, and even though they still took damage with every hit, you'd need a lot of precision, hitting roughly the same spot over and over again, or a shitload of energy in one attack to overcome it. The Bane had demonstrated both during the fight, but in limited quantities.
Really, her best advantage was that the Nineteenth Legion was laser focused on her and the Hand. Gregor too, probably, since they'd sent a melee mage after him. If their mages had focused on destroying her bots instead of trying to kill her, the infantry would have overwhelmed the wall in a swarm attack.
That spoke to the other's side tactics. Possibly something inherent to the Bane. They were so utterly dependent on the sapient parts of their leadership to be combat effective that taking them out makes everything else easy prey.
Sure, her android going down would be a huge blow, but her bots would keep fighting and she'd control them from the escape pod, through the relay tower.
Which brought her to her own performance.
Sapphiria was starting to realize that taking the Force Recon power armor had probably not been the brightest of ideas. It had some desirable characteristics to be sure, like the advanced self-repair systems or the long service and reactor life, requiring minimal maintenance and support. But it was also a piece of gear that was uncompromisingly designed for its niche. It required training and support to be used effectively, and Force Recon units never did direct, stand up battles. Their entire point was to be, well, reconnaissance. In force. Which, granted, usually was accompanied by sabotage, assassinations, the works. But even that was supposed to be done by whole squads of troopers in that gear, accompanied by specialized combat units and other high tech bots.
She had none of those. She was trained to use the armor, but she didn't have actual, full marine training, let alone for a force recon one. She had bots, but they didn't even come close to the ones the suit was optimized to interface and work with.
She sighed. She had what she had. It's not like she could replace it with anything equivalent...
She stopped. No she couldn't.
But what she could do was use magic.
Carefully. Very carefully. But her shredderbots are performed amazingly well with their enchanted armor. And if she could integrate enchantments into her own suit...
She could plug a lot of those deficiencies. At the very least make it tougher.
She brought up the maintenance schematics. She had some work to do.
*****
"Are you sure this course of action is wise, ma'am? Modifications of self-repairing equipment we cannot replicate is...not an endeavor to take lightly." Said Cia, and Sapphiria grimaced, then shook her head as she changed a couple of circuits and moved the entire secondary computer core down in the schematics.
"Depends on your definition of wisdom. If you mean it's safe? Hell no. But neither is getting hit by a freaking particle beam summoned by a skeleton."
Cia stayed silent for a few seconds, then spoke up again.
"May I make a recommendation?"
"Sure." Said the AI, as she pondered where to put the damned crystals and their energy distribution system without interfering with the artificial musculature the thermal cooling system.
"Perhaps modifying your ambassador first would yield better result. And allow for a greater margin of error."
Sapphiria actually paused.
The idea...wasn't outlandish.
Unlike her armor, her ambassador android was made to be reconfigured on the fly. Yes, you could adjust the power armor, but it requires special codes and generally a dedicated armorer as well as equipment she flat out didn't have, in her schematics or even hints of in the library core. Force Recon hardware was the kind of stuff the Federation considered 'highly sensitive', and that meant need to know. She had to pull quite a few strings to get the armor in the first place, and that was with her being a fleet admiral with level one security clearance. As in 'I have worked on some of the Federation's darkest, deepest secrets', like the Killships.
But her android? It was made by her mother. Her mother who still changed her face, if not her entire chassis, every morning. Some times multiple times over the day. At least she'd mostly stopped inhabiting different looking androids all at once. Arcadia may have agreed to dismantle her hivemind and release humanity, but she had still been billions of people and had enough computational power to serve her on Earth to put entire star sectors to shame.
Now she couldn't change the chassis. She was stuck at this build and height -stars damn it-, but she could vary a lot. Rearrange her internals, change almost every one of her squishie bits...she could reconfigure into another woman, a man, both, neither, and into configurations that arguably stretched the definition of humanity, though not as much as some of the biomods before the Arcadia War.
It wasn't necessarily going to give her that much additional combat power. But it was much safer to tinker with.
"That's not a bad idea." She said, saving what she had been working on and closing it, as she pulled her ambassador's schematics instead. "If nothing else, having a reserve of mana crystals always available inside of me would be useful." She smiled. If she told Kalia she'd put mana crystals inside of herself for easy access, she was certain the squishie's mind would go in an entirely different direction to what she actually meant.
"Also your ambassador has taken damage in the previous engagements, and reinforcing it would be wise."
Sapphiria grimaced.
"No arguments there." She raised a finger. "But I'm not turning this into a combatmod."
Some AIs transformed their ambassadors into ersatz combat units. It was a terrible idea and extremely inefficient, but it was a sort of social and cultural statement, but those that did not wish to interact with squishies.
She wanted to interact with squishies. Very much so. And she wasn't about to turn her skin into shitty discount armor plating.
"Nor would I want you to. Your current configuration is vital to your wellbeing and recreational activities."
She saw a flicker of a knowing smile on the simulacrum's face, but it was gone in an instant.
"Uh huh. Well, we can do a few of the basics, but once the scans of the totems are done, I'll interface with them, see all the runes, make sure we haven't missed anything." She'd done ample scans on her own enchantments, and a few of the trinkets Kalia had gifted her, but she was genuinely curious about the Hand's. If nothing else, just the age of the wood could tell her a lot. Was it equipment that was buried with them, or recently manufactured? Was it normal or anomalous wood? Did the energy patterns imprinted upon it affect its physical structure? It didn't seem to affect inorganic matter much, but the manastorm had far great effect on biological materials, alive or dead, though she wasn't sure about undead. Perhaps less violent expressions of magic did likewise. Enchantments seemed to be able to work with some mana loaded into them, but apparently faded if not fed some to top up regularly. Yet most that expressed spells required an external power supply. Why? Maybe this would help her know, because Kalia wasn't entirely sure, only recalling some vague things about 'matrix stability'.
"Understood. Do you require assistance?"
"Just poke me when the repairs for the android are finished, so we can get it out, put the armor in, and then once that's done, poke me again so I can put it back on and we can start working our way through the bots." She hesitated. "Then...join me to help with the designs. Your insights have been very helpful."
"Understood." Sapphiria was absolutely certain she saw a flicker of warmth and genuine happiness at the appreciation she had shown the simulacrum. "Let's be about it."
"I'm not making a catbot to put on my shoulder."
Cia looked utterly confused, and Sapphiria sighed. Right, not even her simulacrum shared all the twenty first century memorabilia and culture her mom had inflicted upon her. Perhaps there would be time to educate her in such matters.
"Nevermind." Continued the admiral. "Let's begin."