The Power Of Ten: Sama Rantha 398 Far Future Ch. 108 – Oh, It's One Of Those Quests...

It was a TL 15 printer, which meant it could largely print off and a.s.semble any kind of tech up to TL 14, which was pretty darn radical. Tech at that level was usually restricted to high n.o.bility and the Mekkers, because it was so darn sweet and juicy.

We were both salivating as we reviewed schematics of some of the tech and weapons accessible with this thing. It wasn't all new, per se, and there were even some improvements on systems made over the millennia, but basically this was stuff only the elite of the Imperium ever got to see.

And see, there were whole fabber-bays with this kind of stuff around, making spare parts for the s.h.i.+p, recycling old material, making new bots as old ones wore out, new ammunition, and the like.

It was one of the things that drove the 'vores and 'syms off the s.h.i.+p, the relentless production of fighting bots operating with computerized efficiency, cleaning up those destroyed, recycling them to fight over and over again, more efficiently than even the 'syms could do, as the bots started flaming biomatter to make sure they couldn't just come back again.

Naturally, those uncounted numbers of bots had long since been powered down, or recycled into other forms. It still left a whole bunch of them available for activation when they sensed an intruder in their material stores and came zipping in to investigate.

Constructs are generally grouped into two categories: robots, and golems. Robots were strictly technological, computer-guided artificial beings of any sort, including cyberized humans once limb and organ replacement started, as opposed to just supplemental chrome. Golems were stuff that had spirits, and were 'alive', but bound to an inorganic form. If magical, these were things like iron, stone statues, ivory figures, clay carvings, wooden effigies, and even reanimated corpses that weren't undead, like Frankenstein's monster. If psionic, they tended to be more crystalline, or with psychoplasm, and in various forms... but being alive, Vampire's Veil would fool a robot, but not a golem.

As they could have some intelligence, golems often formed the heart of construct forces, being efficient, emotionless item spirits capable of responding to changes in events with at least some degree of intelligence. Wed them to a broad enough tactical base, and they could react very appropriately to new events.

But golems couldn't be made by artificial means, they needed that spark that came from psionics or magic to actually work, and in some cases involved actively binding the spirit of something to the sh.e.l.l it would inhabit, which could be human, demon, alien, or a mix of them, depending on what was involved here.

I'd gone further up the s.h.i.+p, towards the sensor areas and computer labs that dominated the front of the s.h.i.+p, where a bunch of the s.h.i.+p's finer production fabbers were located, and thus the materials to feed them. Raiding the stores hadn't been too awful hard, and until that golem had actually spotted me and fixed its six antennae on me, I'd actually been walking through the quietly humming area without too much problem.
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There wasn't a lot of activity on the part of the bots, and universally they stayed out of the central core and refused to do anything other than dust, run maintenance checks, and clean up loose shards of gla.s.s. They hadn't replaced the tubes with new ones, which wasn't a good sign, and generally their repairs were incredibly selective. Doors damaged by psionic attacks were left open instead of fixed, and most major damage was still obvious after the millennia. Minor damage was often fixed and polished away, but anything that looked to have been inflicted by psionic power had been left there, as if it couldn't be fixed, or even acknowledged.

Still, there was nothing like demon-possessed robots up here, the farthest from the pulse, and I didn't even try to get into the system here, the machine language and programming was probably above my tier. Maybe not, just because they could make at TL 14 didn't mean all the stuff was made at that level...

I plummeted down the central shaft, hair spread out to catch the air, give me instant control if needed, and take me out of the range of any bots.

There were no monofilament nets or anything to cut me apart, so I was in no danger coming down, although I was looking at every balcony and access point as I fell past them, making robot forces poised on several of them... but not necessarily from the same AI I was running from.

The Command Balcony came up on me, Cloudstepping Sandals vented momentum, and I skied down onto it and into the hall beyond before my lightfoot sent me skating in, pus.h.i.+ng my Disk of materials ahead of me.

Briggs was in the captain's workroom still, but the tech printer was up and humming, various moving parts and limbs doing this and that with energy fields, melting, cutting, fusing, and laying them down, sometimes in layers only an atom thick at a time.

Briggs grinned at the sight of the stacked crates and containers when I glided in. "Nice." He flipped me a bracelet, which I slapped on. I'd already seen the relay out on the access balcony, and another in the hallway on the way here.

"h.e.l.lo, Tribute!" I told it, slapping it onto my arm. I could interface with it, but I figured that was a surprise that could wait until we had the Purifier built and got the AI plugged into it. Even if it rated as a golem with an Item Spirit, it was still going to have to be cleansed.

"Good evening, d.u.c.h.ess Sama. Did you retrieve any droids I might be able to use?"

I began to set boxes and crates aside here and there, and opened up a crate on the bottom, full of what looked like scattered spare parts. "I disa.s.sembled a dozen different models and threw them in here." I picked up a scouting drone, held it next to the Band, and there was some beeping and speaking. The props and anti-grav on the unit kicked on together, and it whirred quietly to life.

The Tribute had been blind for quite some time, and the lenses of the drone looked over us both in interest, scanning and collating us. "A pleasure to see you both, Your Graces." A scan of laser light played over the components in the box. "I can guide you in rea.s.sembling these bots, Your Grace. Would you like to begin?"

"Sure. Let's go into the other room and give the Duke some room to work." I hefted a quarter-ton of depowered and disa.s.sembled bot parts in my arms, leaving Briggs to go through the rest of the pre-sorted stuff and organize it for the printer to use. "Have you got a breakdown of what the Duke and I have to do to get you all hooked up again?"

"I regret to inform Your Grace that by my calculations, you are very unlikely to have enough firepower to accomplish the task. You will probably need to recruit a fairly sizable military force."

"Mmm. Well, that is not impossible, but we'll attempt as much as we can to get the ball rolling, if possible." After all, while the s.h.i.+p was smart, it didn't have any real idea of our combat capabilities, although it might well have experience with some post-Tens. Still, beings with our degree of resistance to damage were simply not going to be common. Armored things were all over the place, and psychic powers took care of them remarkably well. The sheer lethality of some of the tech here against normal people was overwhelming, actually.

"Very well. What you will have to do is bring a section of molecularly-hardened cable to the appropriate data junctions for all the different data cores. Once they are swapped in and contact is re-established, the different cores can link up and start coordinating efforts."

Mmm. No mention of rebooting or purifying the cores. Well, that wasn't good. However, Briggs and I were fully capable of compartmentalizing our thoughts, a benefit of multiple thought streams, and very little of our deep thinking actually interacted with our physical control at all. So, I could be b.i.t.c.hing this AI out for being a lying f.u.c.k of a machine with some really bad plans at its core, and my face wouldn't move at all, since there was no connection to those thoughts with the part of me that was in physical control. So, not a flicker of change in heartbeat, voice, respiration, anything.

And I'd sure like to see it able to decode all those thoughtstreams going on in my head, I sure would. Especially with a TL 10 sensor drone.

Precautionary tactics meant a hard severance of communication between the cores, in addition to the cores retreating into insulated, guarded, and warded chambers. So, restoring the s.h.i.+p meant restoring those cables and connections. Well enough.

"Can you show me all the points and places we need to do this at?" I asked archly, as I began to dump out parts, and the drone hovered, scanned, and separated them by different bots for me to set about like toys. I was already doing much the same in my head, and so the process was actually very quick, especially when my hair and Tails got involved.

"Your capillakinesis is very developed, Your Grace. I confess that the tentacular lumbar extensions are new to me, although they seem similar to some of the more advanced psionic disciplines in my datafiles."

"Thank you, I've done a great deal of work with it. It's not real telekinesis, of course, but it has its uses. The schematics, please?"

"Yes, Your Grace." The drone's holoprojector hummed up a projection of the full s.h.i.+p in its proper glory, truly an impressive sight. It completely lacked any AMT style design, showing it was definitely pre-Empire in how it was made. The streamlining and aesthetics were much more fluid and expressive, almost surreal in how it was made, which sent off faint alarm bells in the back of my head.

I mean, it wasn't a Warp design, but the Warp had not been so h.e.l.laciously active before the Amourean Ascension, either.

I mentally filled in a lot of the missing stuff, this holo was more detailed than the schema we'd managed to get our hands on, and certainly more than wall displays.

"The primary Cores are located in these locations, recessed deep into the s.h.i.+p when breached and separated." Lights went on in those locations, and I noted them all. "They are divided into Signals, Production, Environment, Engineering, Drive, and Command." Different sections of the s.h.i.+p lit up in series, and all but Command also got control of exterior weapons, among other things. Signals was the top/forwardmost, dealing with sensors, fine tech, communication, computer work, and the like. Production had the largest fabbers. Environment had the largest set of machinery for maintaining the s.h.i.+p's gravity and atmosphere. Engineering naturally dealt most with the s.h.i.+p's power, s.h.i.+elds, and Throne Field, while Drive's concerns were the engines and power core themselves. They all came together and were coordinated with Command, with some overlap between them, but fully able to provide required services for their own sections when separated, complete with redundant stores of goods.

"So, we're going to have to run around to each one of those locations, defeat whatever is standing watch over the data link points, swap in the new cables and transfer modules to replace those that were destroyed, and get them working while presumably under fire."

"Once even minimal control is established, the master override commands will be much more effective," the Tribute a.s.sured me.

"Well, that's nice."

And somehow, we'd have to get the Purifier modules in contact with those AI ahead of time, all while a major war was going on outside and dropping the Warp Zone would be a really bad idea.

Hrm.

Well, interesting intellectual challenge.

We were still being kept up to date. Instead of sending in new teams all the way from the outside, the girls opted to set up a forward operating base so that those here could gain Karma during their downtime. As it was, they were missing a major big fight outside, so at least some steady Karmic gain was needed for them not to fall behind their friends.

It also meant I could send them out exploring the edges of this huge desert ring, and we could expand the Map even while all h.e.l.l was breaking loose in the world above and around us.

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Capillakinesis is, of course, the ability to move your hair. Which is awesome for never waking up with bedhead, btw, as well as never sitting on your hair, catching it in the door, and if you want an awesome 'do, it takes a couple seconds to put it in place.

Or you can snap it like a whip into your opponent's eyes, too.