Chapter 223 - Change Of Plans (Patreon)

Note : Chapters 224, 225 and 226 have also been written and added to the queue !

Chapter 223

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

City of Rebirth

"So, we cannot count on the raiding squadron?" Said Calder as he put down his mug of…Alexandra wasn't sure what the hell it was. It smelled like someone had tossed strawberry, chocolate and a touch ethanol together. Whatever it was, the orcish captain seemed to need the stuff to function properly in the morning.

They were currently standing in one of the observation posts overlooking the city, which had an excellent view of the docking tower. Alexandra had proposed moving to the tower itself, but the orc had declined, pointing out that they'd only get in the way of the troops and civilians bustling around the place, trying to get all the ships stocked up and ready for departure.

"No, unfortunately."

"Can't try to work your way around them?"

Alexandra shook her head.

"It's worse than that. With the damaged ships I can barely outrun them. I managed to break contact but they were in hot pursuit, so when night fell I had to go in the one direction they didn't expect me to."

"The…oh. You went towards Erakis?"

"Yep. But it didn't enable a clean break anyway. Last I saw of them they were in full pursuit, and I'm not going to try anything fancy, not with half of my ships combat ineffective."

"Can't say I blame you. Still, this is going to be a problem."

"I know. Without the additional ships, I don't think my plan will work."

Calder's eyes narrowed at that.

"It might…but we'll have to take some risks."

"That's a considerable understatement. Without the raiding squadron, we'll have to use the Dusk Blade and my corsairs to bait the battleships out. And the corsairs can't fight the lighter vessels if they're busy with the capital ships, so they'll need a lot of escorts. That doesn't leave much to support the main thrust."

"I know. But we don't need a whole lot."

"Air to ground support fire isn't going to be that accurate, or effective."

"Not if you're too far away, no."

Alexandra froze.

"No."

"Oh yes."

"You want to engage an entire battalion of Republic troops with an airship at point blank range? You know, the one at which they can shoot back with everything they've got? Just park yourself in front of them, and pray your broadside can outshoot their mages?"

"Crystal, my dear. I don't plan to park in front of them."

"Then how are you going to shoot at them? The guns won't depress that…far…" Realization dawned on Alexandra. "You're insane."

"I prefer creative."

"An old friend of mine would have argued they're one and the same."

"Very wise person."

"She was." Is, technically, given what she'd done to Seraph. "But even still, this is too insane. I can't risk it. We can't risk it."

"But-"

"Captain." Alexandra held her hand up, and began speaking in her best I'm-the-damned-high-admiral voice. "I appreciate your offensive spirit, truly I do. But not only have I taken ample precautions to prevent their teleport attack from succeeding,-" Or surviving five minutes. "-but there are other considerations at play. Notably, the airships, ships which we will need rather badly both for continuing to immobilize their army and eventually relieve Darthar. Not to mention the fact that attacking without the raiding squadron 'stumbling' upon their commandos on the 'return trip' would also reveal we have a source of intelligence they don't know about, and I'd rather keep that particular ace up my sleeve for now. Besides which, we can still launch an attack, with more ships and better preparations, once the enemy has expended a fair share of their strength on their teleport attack."

And, which weighed heavily in her decision, still allow her to snatch the teleporter, her true primary objective, with less risk to boot. A lot less risk actually. Because she'd run the numbers, and they…were not good, especially not with an essentially untested class like the Corsair serving as the backbone of the plan. Better to let them expend some of their firepower with the commandos obligingly coming to die inside of her dungeon first. Besides, at least she'd get the essence and a lot of easier loot that way!

The orc stared at her for a few seconds. He seemed almost in shock. Not at her arguments, but her manneurisms, and Alexandra belatedly realized that she might have gone a bit too hard on the 'command aura' side of things.

"Those are…excellent points lady Crystal. Still, it goes against the grain."

"That it does. But we're going to need these ships badly, my own arguments to Melia notwithstanding." She could build new raiding squadrons, but the appearance of the interception battlegroup, and the Republic's willingness to send such units after her boded ill if she just lost most of her current naval power, or even just a decent chunk of it. "Even if I can make more, destroyed ships are still a huge hit to our timetable."

"Right, of course." Calder sighed. "And I suppose there isn't much of a point arguing with the baroness about this?"

"Captain, while I do value her opinion and she values mine, we both understand the limit of our own competence. Naval, er, air naval matters are more up my alley and she knows it. If I say it's no longer a good idea, she'll listen."

"Once again, an excellent point." He looked at the docking tower. "Well, I should probably tell everyone to stand down."

"Slow down, rather."

"Yes, if we still decide on an attack."

"Exactly. Though, I will at least make an attempt. Professional pride and all that."

The captain laughed.

"See? This is why I like you, lady Crystal. You and I think alike. Very well, let's do so. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to tell my people to stop running around like lemmings before someone gets crushed under a cargo container!"

"Of course."

Alexandra smiled as the captain departed, before looking towards the horizon.

She was a bit uneasy about this but…sometimes, you had to play it safe.

Time to see if the apparition's teleport interceptor worked properly.

And if they didn't…well, she had influence stabilizers, and her praetorian guard. They might, if they were exceptionally powerful and lucky, make it to her core fortress.

Then their remaining lifespan would be measured in seconds, regardless of how many tricks the Republic had up its sleeves.

*****

"Should we eliminate them?" Asked the aide, and Joachim shook his head, fervently wishing his old friend Gregor hadn't left on the mission to assassinate Tark's Hegemon.

"No. Too risky. And our assets would be almost impossible to sneak in, now that the supply lines with Darthar have been severed." Joachim took in a deep, shuddering breath. "We need to trust in Lesly, to keep them out of the Custodians' eyes until we can pull them out. Push comes to shove…she can do what needs to be done. She won't like it, but she'll do it."

"Yes sir."

"Now, what about our efforts in the Sapphire Kingdom?"

"Proceeding as planned. When Sunrise collapses, evidence will come to light it was Sapphirian mages that made the new brands, under order of their crown." Well, for what little there was of it, since the Sapphirian king was more or less a puppet to the council of archmages. "Before that however, they will have launched their own invasion of Sunrise, in response to the atrocities on the border."

"And thus be 'outed' as maniacs that started a continent wide slaughter in order to weaken and then reconquer their former vassals. Good." It might not drag the Asarian Kingdom into a war with them, but it would give Lesly a jumping off point to argue for one once she was finished dealing with the Republic. "Then phase two will be complete. Are we ready to move onto phase three?"

"We have begun the preliminary work. The UDC should shatter, as planned, and its more militant elements will coalesce back around Lesly. We have also begun deploying the kill-teams in Starcore, and the Eris Imperial Palace. But the Custodians' and Inquisition's activity are slowing us down on every front."

"They're preparing a new Purge. It.Must.Not.Come.To.Pass."

"We'll beat them sir. You can count on us."

"Good. Then let us watch Lesly work her magic then."

*****

"I hate magic." Said Alexandra as she gazed at the prototype.

"Correction, you hate magic when you don't understand it." Said Emilia, and Alexandra rolled her yes.

"Fine, that. But stars damn it, it pisses me off sometimes." She kicked the defunct arcane recoil compensators. "I know what these do. Moreover, I'm starting to understand how they do it." Mainly by reproducing through arcane means a sort of inertial compensator, the kind that kept people from being turned into liquid by the drives of their own ships back on Earth. Or what was it that famous cannibal space pirate had said? Ah yes, the 'most luxurious strawberry jam the universe has to offer'. Yikes. "But the problem is that I can't just upscale it or tweak it like I would for machinery because the rules are freaking different for magic."

"Welcome to the fun part of being an archmage."

"Uh uh." Alexandra drummed her fingers on the workshop table.

"Why can't you use mundane recoil compensators to help as well?" Asked Emilia.

"I already am. Sort of. But that's not the problem at this point. The guns are so large that the issue is moving the entire ship, not distributing the recoil to it and prevent the weapon for being ripped off."

"...Shouldn't you consider making smaller guns then?"

Alexandra chuckled.

"I should, shouldn't I? But we need some proper indirect, long range bombardment artillery for the ships, if we want to take out Sunrise's siege lines. Hell, I'm sure Erakis' fortress will prove more than a formidable obstacle as well. Or…I could make smaller, but more advanced guns."

"Honey, everyone is already having heart attacks at the sight of your current weaponry."

Alexandra smiled.

"No they're not. Not quite at least."

"Perhaps. But you know that if you start going too far beyond Tarkian tech…"

Alexandra winced. The vampire girl had a point.

So far people hadn't been too worried about her dungeon because they automatically assumed that she didn't make her own tech, she just duplicated it, tinkered a bit at most. Thus her getting up to Tarkian hardware right after the town had gotten a massive shipment of it had raised eyebrows but those had been directed at Allya, not her.

The problem was, once she started moving into Erisian tech, people would start asking serious question. The Eris Empire had virtually no presence on the continent, and everybody would know about that kind of military tech moving around. Of course, there were some acceptable sources, like Sylvia's former ship the Creative Acquisition, but it would still get a lot of gears turning and get a lot of questions she'd rather not be asked just yet.

The recon aircraft had already raised some issues, and she'd launched it in the middle of the night, as stealthily as possible. It was basically a council-only secret, with Trira's people guaranteeing that anyone peeping of it would end up in a ditch somewhere. And the councilors had much bigger things on their mind right now than wondering where the hell the dungeon core was getting her stuff.

"Alright, point taken. But we'll have to anyway, sooner or later."

"Probably. But right now do you truly think that's necessary? What was it you said? 'Industry in war is always a balancing act between developing better stuff for tomorrow, while producing enough to stay alive today.' I think right now we should focus on the 'today' part for a bit. If nothing else, we have the 'tomorrow' locked down tight with your little festival of Old World tech down in the basement."

"Seraph's bunker is hardly a 'basement', besides, we have plenty of Old World tech right here!" Alexandra gestured at the workshop, which was starting to look…odd. She had a dedicated prototype storage bay, but she still had stuff she'd left and would 'definitely finish later' and had been sitting on their table for months. There was a blunderbuss, several muskets, a bow…all of it happily comingling with high tech sensors, drones, several laser weapons and even her first attempt at a particle cannon.

That wasn't even counting the various vehicles, the literal piles of schematics, various holograms or the many, many variants of the spider tank that were just on stand by in a corner of the vast room, from one that looked like someone had tried to apply the Chu-Ko-Nu's repeating crossbow trick to a scorpio and then proceeded to slap it all over a tank, to a variant of her Omega-class that had replaced the railguns with plasma cannons and had surface to whatever you wanted dead pulse missile pods, because fuck you and everything in your general vicinity, that's why.

"I know but…Argh, you know what I meant!"

Alexandra giggled, and reached out to hug her girlfriend…and ended up tackling her to the ground instead, the alarms only consciously registering as they both hit the ground with an 'ouf'.

"Wha-" Emilia didn't even have the time to finish her first word, before they both felt it, a few seconds after the sensors did.

"HYPERSPACE EMERGENCE! INCOMING TELEPORT!" Yelled out Alexandra, her voice reverberating throughout the entire core fortress as she plunged into dungeon mode.