Chapter 300

Ytakan Scrublands, Archduchy of Rebirth

Darthar-Asaria trade route

Alexandra grimaced as she looked at the map. And it wasn't just due to the fact that her avatar was utterly incapable of walking right now, and wouldn't be for a fair bit.

Emilia had been...vigorous, to say the least. And even her avatar's regeneration capabilities had its limits. Seriously, who had programmed this thing to be able to quickly regenerate from grievous injuries but mostly ignore the small stuff? It made sense for combat, but it's not like the bitch that had sacrificed her didn't have a fucking shuttle and a squad of guys in power armor to protect her.

Which...now that she thought about it, probably explained all the crap the Order had no doubt sent her way. If it fit in very neatly, didn't it? If they thought that it was the one that had sacrificed her that was the dungeon core, then they wouldn't have to worry about kidnappings.

Just like now, with high tech on her side and so much firepower, nothing short of an archon could get to her. And even then, she had been preparing for that eventuality ever since she'd seen Starvak take on the Hammer of Eternity.

It was definitely a thought she'd need to dwell on later.

"Not a very palatable option, isn't it?" Said Philia, and Alexandra smiled, looking up from the map in the field command tent.

Her esteem of the knight-commander kept rising. The Earth-born had offered her a room in one of the airships, but instead she preferred to ride with her men.

She definitely looked rough around the edges now, her armor having little to do with the brilliant, impeccable one she had arrived in Rebirth with, what was it, over a year ago now?

Now it was an old, battered and well used suit, adjusted here and there for her convenience.

"No, no it's not." Alexandra looked back at the map. "It's not..."

"Royal Union Bridge is the only place an army of our size can cross the Kamira river. There are no fjords this close to the Inner Sea, and the other bridges are...well, small, because who would need them for large amounts of traffic when the bridge is there?"

Alexandra nodded.

"And that makes it the perfect bottleneck."

"Fear not, the bridge is sturdy. They won't have the time to bring people in to demolish it, especially not the pillars, which we can rebuild on."

"That's not the problem. They won't touch a single stone, in fact. I'm ready to bet on it."

"What?"

"It's the perfect bottleneck. The perfect ambush point. There, they can dictate the engagement." Alexandra's eyes narrowed. "As a matter of fact...if they place units on the bridge itself, they'll be immune to our artillery. Since we can't risk hammering the bridge."

"That's a risky gamble."

"So is sending their leader, the one person holding it all together, to Asaria, but the duchess crossed that bridge already." That little tidbit had become widely known remarkably quickly. Though it hadn't been that hard to discern, what with the frenzy of activity in the siege lines around Asaria, trying to clean up like it was about to be inspection day.

And in the same time, slowing down progress on the siege of the city. Inbred idiots.

"So you expect some kind of force."

"I expect something. Not sure what though. It may be where all of those garrisons are withdrawing to, but..." Alexandra shrugged, and Philia nodded.

They'd encountered very few of Sunrise's forces on their way here. And those they had were clearly stragglers that had encountered problems on the way. Mainly guerrillas.

The rest...the rest were moving north or east like all the demons of hell were after them. Which, to be fair, they pretty much were.

Those going east were probably going to join up with that prick and the so called 'Southern Army of Liberation' in Kaidan. Given what she had heard and gotten wind of from the UDC...they were basically telling the duchess to go screw herself and running for the hills.

The others were trying to move north, but probably to join the siege lines and the main army around Asaria, praying that the battle that was sure to take place there would save them.

That was a shame, because a good, minor battle would have been an excellent way to shake out her composite army. Her golem portion functioned just fine, and it was the majority of its power, but the rest...

Darthar's forces, who had caught up with the army during their wait for Sarth's and the preparations for the march, were actually really good. These guys had fought in the siege together, both sieges actually, of the Alesian fortresses and then Darthar itself, and Philia had mercilessly drilled them into a single coherent unit. They fought with precision and determination that belied their otherwise disparate uniforms and origins. Their battlefield communications weren't great, but she was in the process of remedying that, and in the meantime they fought with a tenacity her golems would be proud of.

Sarth's forces were more problematical. It was more of a hodgepodge. Sarth's core, home troops were well disciplined, and the desert rangers were outright fucking terrifying, but the rest...

Vassals' household troops, be they knights or conscripts, town and village militias, even some reinforcements from the western baronies, which were a mixed bag as well, ranging from former adventurers to trained field units, though thankfully no peasant levies. None were truly abysmal, even the militia had some idea of what they were doing, but they had no training together. During their advance up to there, they had little opportunity to train and drill on the march, and Sarth's own household troops had formed the spearhead, using her gifted ships and weapons to absolutely flatten any opposition Sunrise sent their way.

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It had gained them time, but prevented the others from shaking up and gaining coherence.

Alexandra realized there had been quite the silence, and she cleared her throat. Speaking of lack of coherence...

"How are our newest friends?"

"The Kaidan free company is going along remarkably nicely." With all the partisans flocking to their army, they'd actually dissolved the remnants of the Kaidani units that Philia had under her command, and used the trained soldiers as a cadre for the partisans now going to them. Many of them were actually citizens of Sarth, but they didn't mind. Kaidan was a symbol now, one of Sunrise's cruelty and tyranny. "Despite their problems, they remain highly motivated and remarkably disciplined."

Alexandra nodded.

"That makes sense. They all have one hell of an axe to grind with Sunrise." Or in many cases, a dwarven arsenal's worth of axes. "And anyone who didn't understand discipline got...caught."

Silence descended upon the tent. They'd all seen the horrific displays of barbarities set along the roads, to serve as a warnings to the others.

"Speaking of...some have expressed, ah, disappointment at our current prisoner policy."

"We're not barbarians. I refuse to stoop to their level and blindly execute everyone we come across. If we capture someone, we give them a fair trial, period. That's not up for debate. Understood?" There was iron, hard and unyielding, in her voice, and the knight-commander physically recoiled.

"Of course, ma'am. Uh, milady."

"Good. Have most of our troops crossed the highway?"

The knight-commander nodded.

"They have. Only the supply and artillery trains remain."

"Then let's get to it." Alexandra looked outside at the vista.

It was almost painful, in its own way. A gigantic megahighway, the kind that had crisscrossed Earth, and eventually other worlds, during her life.

But this one was a ruin. The so called 'Crimson Path'. Shattered and destroyed, both by war and the ravages of time. Still, it remained surprisingly intact. According to the desert rangers, there were even long stretches of it relatively intact and useable, between Sarth and Lost Sands.

But not the sections near Darthar. Those were wrecked beyond belief. Possibly by centuries of use by the trade caravans, but most likely by the cataclysm of having the Flickerlight and the rest of its fleet's debris field crash down onto the planet below. Who knew what else laid below the sands, waiting to be discovered? The Flickerlight had been a fluke, a ship discovered because it had crashed on top of a mana spring, one that had allowed it to reactivate, its shield marking the location.

How many more vessels were underneath the soil, waiting to be rediscovered? She needed to make a note, build some ground penetrating scanners and do a full sweep someday.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Alexandra chuckled, but only shook her head as Philia gave her a questioning look.

"Nothing, nothing. Let's go get our forces across."

The knigth-commander nodded, and followed her out of the tent.

Time for some old fashioned logistics.

*****

"The recon flights are useful, don't get me wrong, but we really need more of them." Said Allya as she paced around the holographic projector in the command center, while Alexandra watched her, draped on her chair, very pointedly not sitting on her rear. "We really need more info. Not continuous surveillance, but even just a daily snapshot of what's ahead, on the army's path, would be immensely helpful."

"I know, but despite my mana surplus, those flights still cost a lot. And that's not even counting the fact that the more the army advances, the longer the blackbirds have to fly to get ahead of it. That means more fuel, and more flight time, which means more maintenance and the potential for more failures on route and losing a bird. We recovered the one that crashed near Darthar, but there's no guarantee it'll even manage a crash landing like that one did."

"So...could you cut down the distance, then? Bring them close to the front? They are VTOLs after all."

"They are, but...Well, landing them in the field is a no go. They need constant maintenance, basically a full strip down and overhaul after each flight. It's not necessarily that complicated to do tools wise, it's just time consuming, and takes a lot of attention to detail. Especially for the engines, my golems basically go over them with a freaking toothbrush."

"So, some kind of workshop, then? Or an airbase?"

"A workshop would have to be shipped, and keep up with the army. That means constantly setting it up, repairing the craft, and then packing up. Even if we do it at night, that's still too long. We'd slow the army down and do one hell of a ruckus during the night. That means getting it away from the troops, but at which point, what's going to protect it? We can detach a unit, but it'll be permanently trailing behind the main force, inviting an assault, not to mention if they can't keep up the gap will just get larger and larger and we'll be back to square one, just with more stuff we need to move forward. An airbase just delays the problem. Yeah, we could build some kind of outpost, but that means deploying forces to protect it. Not even from Sunrise, just monsters attacking, or even thieves or desperate people looting it. The lands north are royally fucked, what Sunrise couldn't take it burned, it's hell out there."

"I know. I've seen the pictures. And the aftermath of such things."

Alexandra met the archduchess' gaze, and nodded.

"So yeah. Another solution is a string of airbases, but that means using even more forces, and there's a point at which it becomes too good of a raiding target, and Sunrise will send something. A raiding unit can chose it's time and place to strike, while we'll have to defend every single base."

"Just like the Republic and its convoys."

Alexandra inclined her head.

"Precisely."

"So, in that case, how about a mobile airbase?"

Alexandra chuckled.

"You don't ask for much, do you? A carrier? Though....Mmmhhhh..." Alexandra snapped her fingers, and gestured at the holographic projector. The map hovering above it was replaced by the hologram of a ship. "This could do."

"Is that one of your transports?"

"Sort of. I used the Freedom-class hull as its basis. I needed the internal volume, without the obscene cost, nor size, of the Culture-class."

"Can't argue with that last one. That ship is big, even for a battlecruiser."

"Had to be, it's a giant missile silo. So, I had the idea to modify a Freedom-class' hull to create a drone carrier. It was so I could use the shorter ranged, propeller powered ones I'd designed for way back when Coledar was still heading our way, when they would get close enough. I never got the chance to use them."

"And now you're thinking of converting it to a full aircraft carrier?"

"Precisely. Mobile airbase, right? Just a bit on the small size. Escort carrier sized. Sacrifices will have to be made though. We need two blackbirds for redundancy, both if we lose one or we need a recon flight now and one is undergoing maintenance. So we'll need to compromise on the drones and existing design. Like, a lot. Especially since we'll need a full workshop onboard."

"We could use the shorter range, more reliable recon too."

"I know. That means keeping the recon units. At least some of them. But with arcane air defenses being so damned lethal for smallcraft, we can scrap the attack drones. Part of the reason why I never built them was because it didn't seem all that cost effective, with the probable losses. That means the missile and bomb magazines, as well as the ammunition loading bays can go too." Allya watched in fascination as the dungeon core gestured, and the ship exploded into a myriad of rooms, parts and systems, some of them disappearing as the Earth-born named them. She rarely got to see the dungeon core actually work, and she was a tad jealous at the ease of which the former EFSN officer redrew schematics. Schematics that would otherwise have taken days for entire teams of shipwrights to even draft amendments for. "That frees up a lot of volume and mass, but not all of that volume is contiguous. So we'll rearrange the launch bays."

"Launch bays?" Allya stopped pacing, and pointed at the top of the ship. "Doesn't it have a flight deck?"

Alexandra shrugged.

"It does, but taking off from just the flight deck is a gamble in combat, especially with the balloons and other potential issues. I tried to make a separate gundeck underneath to keep it clear, but there's still some overlap, especially for damage control teams to get to the guns if they get hit. I only have so much volume to work with after all. So I put in a pair of lateral launch bays. They're trickier to use, have a non zero risk of launch failure damaging the craft, and they can't recover drones, but they're a very useful feature to have. Usually you need to get your aircrafts in the air in a lot more hurry than you need to get them home, and there's a lot more breakage doing that. It's why it's called scrambling after all."

"Point taken. Can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?"

"Right. So, what we need to do is pull the launch bays back towards the stern, where the magazines were." The hologram shifted, rearranging the ship. "That'll open up space next to the elevator, with the loading bays gone. We'll need some of that space to expand the elevator so it can accommodate the blackbirds, but the rest can be used as a workshop. As a bonus, we'll even be able to use it for the drones if the blackbirds are lost or simply don't need it for the moment."

"That's good. So...it's ready?"

"What? Hell no! This is a presentation, we'll need at least a day spent doing simulations for weight distributions and structural integrity. Then we'll have to build prototypes for everything, test them, then assemble a prototype for the ship itself."

"Right, sorry."

Alexandra smiled.

"It's okay, you're not an engineer."

"Plus you seem to..."

"Perform miracles on a regular basis?"

"I wouldn't have put it quite that way, but yes."

"Well, even my awesomeness has its limits."

"Modest, too."

They exchanged smiles.

"Well then, it's high time I got to work."

"Can I watch?"

"Don't you have your own stuff to do?"

"If I'm being honest, they kind of set themselves up now so most things just run without me. They had to, and I see no reason to give myself more extra work when they were doing such a bang up job. Better than I could have done in some areas, actually."

"If it works, don't fix it."

"Basically, yeah. And I'm not some kind of control, micromanaging maniac that needs to have my fingers everywhere."

"Yes, Pyn would dislike that."

"Uh huh."

Alexandra opened her mouth to let loose another quip, then her rear helpfully reminded her of Emilia and her riding crop, and she suddenly decided that she didn't have room to talk.

"Very well. It'll be a nice change of pace to have you along. Now quickly, to the laboratory!"

She struck a pose, and Allya face palmed.

"Are you just...always like that in private?"

"Only to my most trusted friends." Alexandra smiled as Allya blushed slightly. "Come on now, let's build ourselves a carrier!"