Chapter 297

Red Sands Desert, Archduchy of Rebirth

In Flight

"So, not the greatest inlaws." Said Allya, rearranging her hair to hide the hickeys on her neck as she sat on her bed in the secure cabin. "That's unfortunate."

Alexandra shrugged, the hologram glitching slightly as it brushed against the furniture. The cabin had been nice before, but it had been semi renovated during their return to Darthar, her way of apologizing for blowing up the door. The merchants had basically fallen all over themselves to provide the furniture, even the few local artisans pitched in. It was actually more luxurious than their place back home, and more...generously provided in nightly necessities as well, as Pyn would say.

"It is what it is."

"Will they be a problem?" Asked Pyn, before shrugging as the two others looked at her. "I mean, they can say one thing, and do another. And they did try to attack you."

"Restrain, more like."

If they'd attacked her...They would be in a cell, at best.

And had they attacked Emilia, there wouldn't have been anything left of them to regenerate from.

Allya's eyebrow rose.

"Emilia upset about that?"

"Very. She seemed more upset about it than me cutting her sibling in half, actually, which is...worrying."

The archduchess shrugged.

"They're vampires. Especially for their soldiers, it's not that much more debilitating than being hit with a rock for them after a few minutes. It's annoying, nothing more."

"I know, it's why I did it. It seemed to get the message across at any rate."

"Let's hope. So, Emi was upset about you being tied up by her sister."

"Wording, please."

Allya chuckled.

"We're all adults here." Among other things. "Alright, so, you have your sister in law visiting, with some reinforcements. Anything good there?"

Alexandra nodded.

"Yep. A full team of enchanters. Those are gonna prove very, very useful."

"But let me guess, no spellbooks, and the same stupid limitations as your girlfriend?"

"Yes. But that won't matter."

Allya and Pyn exchanged a look.

"...How so?" Finally said the archduchess.

"Let's just say that I have some...alternate projects."

"You always do. Does it have something to do with a certain crashed ship?"

Alexandra smiled mysteriously.

"No, but that was a good guess."

"What are you planning to do with that thing?"

"Right now? If I'm being honest, I'm going to have to roll some dices."

"...Please don't destroy Darthar."

"Why would I?"

"Don't take me for an idiot. You waited for us to get out of any potential blast radius."

Alexandra was silent.

What could she say? Allya was absolutely right.

"Among other things." She finally said. "I'm sorry."

"I...understand there are secrets you keep. But we are stronger together, are we not?"

"We are. But some things must remain in the shadows. For now, at least. Besides, I'm sure you're keeping some secrets of your own as well."

"I am." Bluntly admitted Allya.

"Well, I suppose we have some measure of equality in that department then."

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The archduchess sighed.

"Just...be careful. Please?"

"I will. Believe me, I will."

*****

"Your investigators have failed." Said the Custodian.

The Adjudicator nodded.

"Yes...they have."

For a full minute, silence descended upon the room. And with passing second, the Seraphim grew more nervous, as the chosen of the God of Fire simply stared off into the distance.

This...was unlike the Custodian.

Finally he turned towards her.

"The Purge is nigh. And the Order's designs may be grander than we had anticipated."

The Adjudicator held her breath.

What she had taken for anger...wasn't.

It was uncertainty.

The Custodian was hesitating.

The chosen of the God of Fire, one who had slain billions upon billions without blinking...was hesitating.

"What...happened?"

There was another long silence, but this time the Custodian's eyes were boring into her own.

"We have found significant clues that the Order may have been rebuilt far earlier than we had anticipated. And may have been working to a single, unified plan during that time."

"...Ah."

"Indeed." The giant in golden armor leaned back, and his assurance returned, so completely that the Adjudicator couldn't be sure she hadn't hallucinated his previous hesitation. The smallest crack in his armor. "We cannot afford to let that thread slip."

"I will double my effort."

"You will. But subtlety is no longer required. They know that they are being watched."

The Adjudicator bowed.

"I understand. I will deploy in person."

"Then there is nothing left to discuss. Glory be His Name."

The Adjudicator bowed even more deeply.

"And glory be His Pyre."

With that, she left the room.

She stopped in the almost deserted hallways beyond, as she realized that her hands were trembling, and she forced herself to calm down.

The Custodian...was hesitating.

For the first time in her life, her new life, which had started when she left her name behind and accepted His Divinity's gifts and became one of his angels, she felt doubt.

Could they...lose?

She tightened her hands into fists, and shook her head.

She had a job to do. His will must be done, and His enemies rooted out and eradicated.

There was no room for doubt. No room for error. Not now. Not when the fate of Alcheryos, and many worlds besides, hanged in the balance.

She stalked through the hallway with renewed purpose.

All the while the insidious little voice of doubt kept whispering inside her.

*****

System, system. Sent Alexandra.

There was a slight pause.

Then the Flickerlight, or at least the AI within, answered.

Acknowledged.

Then nothing, and Alexandra sighed. The AI had made its opinion on what she should do clear, and had gradually locked her out of everything else.

Her subtle attempts and probes had yielded...not nothing, thanks to her delve into the communication systems, but it was clear they were going nowhere.

Time for some radical measures.

Normally she would have played for more time, tried more angles. But Freya's arrival...

The vampires didn't tell the Church everything, or she would already be dead. They knew about her high tech after all. Though they clearly didn't know everything.

But there was no way Freya being sent here wasn't on behalf of the Church. At least to some extent. The UDC was collapsing, and the noose was tightening.

Soon, there wouldn't be time for caution. She might as well do it on her own terms, and stay ahead of the curve.

Com-Stat, ARCADIA CENTCOM-5.

Enquiring about Arcadia was a gamble. because if the AI pinged her, it could find out what she was, and more importantly, if Arcadia had indeed rebelled and tried to take over...

Then there would be safeguards. But she had to try.

ARCADIA CENTCOM-5: Offline.

Query: Elaborate.

ARCADIA CENTCOM-5: Compromised, hostile, destroyed.

Alexandra closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

The Sagitarius Empire...they thought someone had hacked Arcadia.

And turned her against them.

...Just like a dungeon core could be turned against its people with the flick of a switch. Courtesy of the God of Fire.

Cold fury filled her...which turned to horror. What if such a switch had been implemented in her? Not through the dungeon core, but before, when she came into this world.

What if every extradimensional had one?

She shelved the thought for later. Ghost had run diagnostics, but not against something as insidious as this. But...there were limits to what one could do with biological material.

And more importantly, the God of Fire wasn't aware of Ghost. Which meant that whatever had brought them here either hadn't looked...or wasn't the God of Fire.

But there was no time. Because now was the tricky part.

If they had killed Arcadia, and hadn't recovered her...it meant they didn't know some of her deepest protocols.

And if that ship even acknowledged Arcadia as within its chain of command, it meant that they hadn't purged those protocols out of the ship. Nor that Arcadia had used them, or that ship wouldn't have been on their side.

What she was about to do...

Had Glitch not happened, they wouldn't have even considered it.

Nor made the protocols for it.

After all, the simplest solution to avoiding another synchronization attempt killing her, was making sure it would work properly, if all the barriers failed.

System, system. Arcadia Systems Emergency Protocols List, Initialize Case Omnicron.

Processing...Warning: Protocol List access unauthorized.

Override, emergency code eight eight nine five. Authentification: Archangel.

Authentificating...Accepted. Override online. Memlock required.

Alexandra stopped.

A memlock protocol?

That was...the rarest type of security system. Because Arcadia had built it exclusively for her most sensitive projects and protocols. As in 'jack into the central core on Earth' sensitive.

It scanned the entire memories of the person connected. It used the entirety of what they remembered as a giant authentification system, verifying they were who they said they were, that they had authorization...

And that they hadn't been altered, or coerced. That this wasn't a fake or a copy.

The perfect security protocol to implement for an AI that thought she had been compromised. For an AI desperate to try and limit the damage she was going to cause as she failed.

But...Alexandra was a fake.

A construct, falsified and made out of the modified and warped memories of another.

And if she pulled out now...The security systems would definitely trigger. Arcadia would have made it no other way.

She hesitated to open the simulation, but disregarded it. Instead she bundled the memories, the logs, and pushed them onto Ghost directly.

There was a flicker, and suddenly Alexandra felt herself kicked out of the stealth golem, still jacked into the ship's airlock, as Ghost took her place. She watched as Ghost took a mental deep breath. It was bizarre, like being a spectator inside her own head. Was that how Ghost always felt?

Initialize Memlock protocol. Sent her other self.

And then everything exploded. It felt like she remembered everything Ghost did at once...and then it was gone.

Memlock Protocol completed. Processing...

There was a short moment of silence.

Then they felt the connection expand. Suddenly they didn't just feel the dungeon, the influence, the golems...but also reactors, maintenance drones, missile launchers and atmospheric plants.

The Omnicron protocol was for replacing a ship's captain. And Arcadia had decided that something...similar might be necessary for her own systems, someday.

Case Omnicron implemented. Central Core - Subordinate Node Synchronization Complete. SINS Flickerlight in Fleet Command network.

*****

"Adjudicator?"

The Seraphim came to a halt, and gazed at the sensor tech. A fellow angel, he bowed quickly.

"What is it soldier?"

"My lady, we have logged an anomaly with the crashed vessel at Darthar."

The Adjudicator frowned. Darthar? That ship was a tripwire, a honeytrap, deliberately left there as a piece of ham to attract those willing to defy the God of Fire's edicts. One of the many strewn about the world. And the reason why they had been able to destroy the Order the first time around, despite the...steep price.

"What anomaly?"

"There has been a significant shift in transmission patterns. We don't know what to make of it. We do not have a tap inside however, so..."

"A surface investigation is necessary." And one by Seraphims. Because even the inquisition couldn't be trusted for this.

They were loyal. But if they learned the God of Fire had left the ruins and automata of the Old World as traps...

Many of them wouldn't even survive the Purge to begin with. But they were still needed. For now.

"Yes, my lady."

She opened her mouth to order the teleporter redirected, but then she hesitated.

The small, traitorous voice was chattering in her ear.

She squashed it, but too late. The doubts had already entered her mind. Could she truly afford to do this? Could she let go of that vital thread, when even the Custodians weren't sure?

No. No she couldn't.

She closed her mouth.

"As unfortunate as it is, we cannot investigate." She closed her eyes. "It is probably due to the secondary dungeon core, anyway." There was a reason why they didn't put dungeon cores ontop of ruins after all! But of course, the one that had been put ontop of one, not by their actions, was building one of her mad, mana losing 'branch offices' ontop of even more of them. Damn the God of Light and his schemes! "Has it been logged?"

"Yes, Adjudicator."

"Then your duty is done. Once this is all over, we will take a look. But for now, we have more important matters."

"Of course."

"Back to your post. And good work. Glory be his name."

The sensor tech nodded, accepting the compliment.

"And glory be His Pyre."

The Adjudicator watched him go, before continuing on her way to the teleportation chamber.

She had a mission to accomplish.