Notes : Chapter 130 has been written and added to the queue !
Getting things back on track, currently inspired for MFR still, will try to switch out in the next few days.
My tinnitus gets louder when I grit my teeth or tense my jaw for some reason. Idk why, but it's probably significant, if I could only get an APPOINTMENT ABOUT IT. Same for my allergies. Joys of joys.
Quick reminder that the review copies for book 2 are available if you want them, and that the novel releases on the 5th ! I'll probably do an announcement then and...argh, probably ask for reviews again. I hate doing that. I really hate doing that, but it's too effective to make it an option not to, or get crushed in that fucking amazon algorithm.
Chapter 127
Starborn Mountains, Mount Nebula
Crash Site
"That should do for now." Said Sapphiria as she gazed at the schematics. "We'll do a full set of simulations, then build it outside of the android, run some tests, and only then incorporate it. First a version of it into a bot, then my ambassador. One piece at a time, with testing at each step." She was not going to take undue risk with her android if she could avoid it.
Cia nodded.
"Understood." She tilted her head. "Analysis of the totems is still ongoing, and the first bots are still being repaired. Shall I pull out the list?"
Wait. Is that where the TO-DO LIST went? Was Cia actually reading that thing?
"No. I'll start reviewing the documents we digitalized. If nothing else, with negotiations happening, we need to know who we're up against. Whatever they are now, the Hand and the rest of the Bane certainly seem to think they are the Eternal Empire and are upholding its mission. That means we need to know about it. Even if a lot has changed, they're resurrected from the Empire that was. And it will help plug some blindspots on their capabilities."
"That would certainly be helpful. I have also assembled some weapon schematics for review to counter energy shields. Mostly lasers."
Sapphiria grimaced.
"Can we power them?"
"...Not without a power core, at least for sustained combat."
"Well...we might not have to. With magic, there are...possibilities." Sapphiria grimaced. "But I need a breather, so some reading first." She raised her hand as Cia opened her mouth. "If you are about to suggest I head back to the surface for relaxation, you will be overstepping your bounds." Sapphiria smiled at the simulacrum's studiously neutral expression. "But I'll get back up in a bit. Nevertheless, some light reading should do me some good."
She'd always loved a good book. Hell, she'd been reading while pursuing the raiders in hyperspace.
It was time to see what this planet had in terms of literature.
*****
"Well this is...weird."
Teman had been thorough regarding the documents he'd sent. She hadn't realized they'd brought that much along, and some of it was probably personal possession of some of Astralis' residents, probably the ones who hadn't made it and whose stuff they could afford to keep transporting.
There was a breadth of data and perspectives in there, but a lot of it was...well, either affected by the return of the Bane, decades before, or wore the tinted glasses of nostalgia for an Empire whose legacy your government and culture had claimed for its own.
There were treatises and distillations of historical records as well of course, scholarly works backed by universities and such, but unfortunately they were...suspect, to say the least.
They always were. Squishies always assumed that history was an unchanging, objective thing, but even in the Federation it couldn't be. Even the best of scholars had inherent biases and a flawed perspective. That wasn't even touching upon intentional tampering by the powers that be to make themselves look better, or try to give themselves right to rule, or justify their doctrine and ideology. There was a reason the Theocracy's official history read more like scripture than anything, because by and large it was, tampered with and 'adjusted' by generations of clerics at the behest of a leadership always needing more power, or to be shown in a better light. Not to mention petty minded tyrants seeking to remove their rivals or their achievements from the records.
The Federation's greatest advantage in that matter was that the historical figures were still alive. Well, technically not, Federation biotech was good but not 'biological immortality' good, but many had digitalized themselves over time, and it was pretty hard to try and change the record on what happened during, say, the second battle of alpha centauri when her aunt had commanded it and basically memorized every aspect of it when she'd tried to see any way she could have saved her siblings. Even centuries later, ordering her brother and wife, who might as well have been her blood sister, to their deaths haunted her.
Plus, as a further safeguard, the Federation had made the Cold Archives, a series of datavaults in which documents could be submitted and copied, but never modified. Once it was in, it could never be amended or changed. You could submit a different version, but it would never supplant the previous one. It meant that, at least, they had history as the people of the time saw it, and that was incredibly valuable, even if only for perspective.
These documents had none of that. They were made by squishies who wrote under the aegis of institutions whose funding or continued existence hinged on a government that, for better or worse, had a considerable interest in presenting the Eternal Empire in a certain light.
She wasn't a scholar, but she had written and scrutinized millions of reports. She knew what massaging the data to please a higher up looked like.
Still, there was a lot she had been able to learn. Like, for example, the Emperors. You could learn a lot from a nation by looking who was at the top.
Interestingly enough, in an Empire dedicated to making people immortal via undeath, undead themselves were forbidden from sitting on the Throne. Only a living, breathing person could. And even those were expected to step down. Out of all the Emperors to sit on the Eternal Throne, only half a dozen or so had died of natural causes on it. Some had died on the field of battle, others had been assassinated, though those two were mainly during the Age of Fury. The vast majority actually retired after a while. There was no set term length or anything, but there was tradition and Sapphiria knew how powerful of a force that could be. Their first Imperator, Kallaran, the 'greatest of the necromancers', had set it by retiring after eighty years of reign to the day, and handing it over to his adopted son, Vallir. Kallaran had even lived long enough to see him retire and get it to the next heir, the first Imperatrix, Mystra, some sixty years later. Not all Emperors were Heroes or had the lifespan to sit on the Throne that long, but most of them had amazingly long reigns by medieval terran standards.
It had made both the Empire staggeringly bereft of succession crises and extraordinarily stable, as the transition of power was done under the watchful eye of the previous ruler, yet enabled it to remain innovative. Thanks to fresh blood at the helm, the Empire could evolve and adapt, while retaining an unbroken link to the previous generation and gaining the benefits of long, stable visions that could enact multi-decade projects and overhauls of the entire realm.
She could see how the Eternal Empire had eventually conquered most of the world. The undead hadn't been the true factor there, their real advantage had been the ability to outlast and outscale absolutely everybody else. Kind of how the Federation had won against the Theocracy and kept ahead of its successor states.
There were two things the documents didn't really discuss more than in passing, but she found very interesting. The first one was that successors weren't successors by blood. Or at least, very rarely. Following in Kallaran's footsteps, most Emperor and Empresses were effectively appointed successors of their predecessor, adopted as what had to be a stabilizing tradition at the start, where hereditary government was the way most city states of the time ruled themselves and was the easiest form of continuity to understand for the nascent Empire's citizens, but had become a formality towards the end of the Empire.
The second one was that an Emperor or Empress became so after sitting on the Throne. There were no field appointments in an emergency, nothing. You didn't get a crown put on you and then sat on the throne like most monarchies.
It was a detail. But...
In the card game Gregor had played with her, the Throne was above the Emperor. The Hand hadn't extended the protection of the Empire over the negotiations for their armistice, they'd extended the protection of the Throne.
And one of the factions during the Age of Fury, an age that had caused the collapse of the Empire and its tipping into decline...was called the Thronebreakers.
There was something there, but whatever it was, the Theocracy was either not interested in it...or had been suppressing it.
Stars, she wished she hadn't become so familiar with that lately.
After finding out about the nutrigel spices, she had done a bit of digging, and she was astonished at the amount of information the Federation suppressed. Not erased, just...not advertised and difficulty to find.
She'd known it existed. Shit, she'd worked on suppressed projects. Like when she'd been tasked with moving the killships deployment and construction centers to better positions. The positions were secret, hence her level one clearance, but not the existence of the killships. They were...
They were something her aunt had come up with when the war with the Theocracy was the darkest, and it looked like there was a genuine possibility that humanity wouldn't make it. It was simultaneously a very human gesture and cold logic. A final 'fuck you' to the Theocracy and the certainty that humanity's fate wouldn't be shared by others in new galaxies if the Theocracy started expanding again.
It was suppressed. People knew of the program, the data had been declassified before the war was even over. But it wasn't common knowledge.
It was, after all, calculated, premeditated mass murder on a galactic scale, and no one was comfortable with that, not even the coldest and most warlike AIs like Ciel, who had nuked an entire city full of squishies to get into a position of power. Before the Federation, of course, but still.
Kill ships were an offshoot of the European Federation's Final Contingency. Where stealth cruisers armed with planetkiller weapons would burn the colonies to cinder. Her mom had stolen the plans for that before taking over Sol, and built her own. Or, more accurately, her aunt had stolen the plans for her. It was part of the reason why the Federation had been formed, as both sides of the Arcadia War knew they had the means to wipe the other out. A fight to the bitter end was a zero sum and so they had come together to negotiate.
The kill ships were, in essence, modernized Final Contingency-class cruisers. Except with a handful of tiny little details.
They had no crew. No squishies, no AIs, no simulacrums. They were entirely automated, with no sentient oversight. Pure, unalterable, simple machine logic.
And they were self replicating. Not directly, as that was inefficient, but they had detailed programs to build and deploy shipyards that would then crank out more killships who would build more shipyards and so on.
Their directive was simple: kill everything. If humanity was to fall then by the stars they would take the entire fucking Theocracy with them and make absolutely damned certain Andromeda and the rest of the universe would be spared their atrocities.
The problem was that any exceptions in their targeting would open them up to be exploited. No sapient AI could take the strain of those atrocities, so there could be no variable component. Plus it was safer this way. The kill ships' only limitation was staying within the Milky Way, as at least they'd learned enough to know the Theocracy had never ventured beyond it nor were capable of it thanks to their inferior hyperdrives. Not that Federation hyperdrives would find the journey short or easy -even the Starprism's top of the line hyperdrive would have taken over a century, and it would have needed to jump back into realspace for regular maintenance, overhauls and cycling periods, so three hundred years or so would have been more accurate-, but they could do it.
Other than that...everything with life, the possibility thereof or an artificial energy signature was going to get bombed until it was back to silence. Surviving, hidden human colonies, Theocracy core worlds, space habitats, asteroid mining installations, even maybe a virgin, undiscovered world on the galactic rim. Didn't matter, if there were holes in the targeting the Theocracy would find it and use it.
So the only option to ensure vengeance was complete extermination of all life and non-killship technology in the galaxy, with self replicating vessels of genocide. A deliberate Von Neumann Berserker.
And that was something a digitalized human had thought up, someone who had been part of her mom's hivemind and thus more AI than squishie in every measurable metric.
There was shit in the warlab last resort programs squishies had come up with she couldn't even summon the will to read.
Some days she wondered if the Theocracy ever realized how close they'd come to unleashing hell.
In any case, information was suppressed. But the breadth of it was staggering. Not just nutrigel spices or killships but biomodification programs she thought were long abandoned, entire classes of cybernetics, colonial schematics. There was so much data tucked away in there it felt like an entire second library core was hidden within the main one.
So, hiding facts about a Throne seemed positively pedestrian in comparison. But-
Sapphiria blinked as she got a ping.
Movement at the Pass.