Embers After Flames, Chapter 12.7 (Patreon)

12.7

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I had a single major problem left to deal with.

That problem was Coral.

There were, across the entire planet, a lot of Coral deposits.

There were several hundred small deposits of little real consequence, aside from the fact that they were all seeds for future growth.

There were a few dozen moderately sized deposits, which could provide a steady, if small, supply of Coral to anybody who could get to them. Consequently, they were also large enough that if those colonies were mishandled, a Surge would melt everything close to it.

There were eight large deposits, equal in size to the colony that had been being monitored by Watchpoint Delta. A surge from any of those would end up redrawing geography.

And, of course, the final supply of Coral was diffuse; it floated in continuous waves throughout the atmosphere, burning the sky as it did.

Considering the danger of unregulated Coral, all of it needed to be contained as soon as possible. Considering additionally that the atmospheric Coral held the potential to form new Coral Minds, I needed that done quickly.

To do that, however, I really only had the one option.

There was only a single facility large enough, capable enough, to handle all that Coral in a timely manner.

The Vascular Plant.

I had been considering the problem of reclaiming the atmospheric Coral for years, even before I first heard the murmuring voices of the sky. The only thing that particular confirmation had changed was how much I was willing to change the scale of the efforts to recover it.

The Vascular Plant was, by far, the largest structure that had ever been built on Rubicon.

Technically, there were larger structures in orbit, with the numerous rings that wrapped their way around the entire planet, but those weren’t on the planet, and therefore, they don’t count.

Here’s the thing.

The in-game model of the Vascular Plant lied. That version was stupidly huge, yes, but it wasn’t accurate to life. It was contrasted against a planet model that was only seven percent the size of Earth, when Rubicon in fact was about the same size, but denser.

The real Vascular Plant was, as a consequence, bigger. At its widest, the Vascular Plant was two hundred and ninety six kilometres in diameter. When it had been completely intact, it had stretched six hundred kilometres tall, and that wasn’t counting the extra two dozen kilometres it had extended underground. It reached into the lower bounds of the exosphere.

For such an absolutely massive megastructure, it had a very simple purpose.

It was a glorified oil rig. Its only purpose was to extract the enormous supply of Coral from the underground caverns in which it had been discovered. Its height was simply to make it easier for ships to move the Coral to where people wanted the Coral to be, and it was judged that it was more efficient to simply make it tall enough that ships wouldn’t need to land.

When the Fires had ignited, the lower section had been destroyed, and the upper section had been left to fall back to Rubicon.

I did not need the Vascular Plant at its full size. In truth, the best way to recover the atmospheric Coral was simply to raise the upper section to the same height as the Firestorms, and then wait for the Convergence Effect to do its thing.

And that was the plan.

The remnants of the lower section still lingered on the Ice Field, after all. I wasn’t going to want for materials.

There were just a few things I needed to do, first.

The first step was simple; significantly reduce the size of the storage inside the Vascular Plant.

This was a very necessary step, because it was, on its own, large enough that if it filled up, the Coral within would become so dense that it would trigger the runaway mutation stage of its growth. The ultimate result of that had gotten its own entire route in the game, and I had no real desire to cast the die.

I had basically gutted the Vascular Plant to fix that. The original storage chamber had been shrunken significantly, reduced to a mere fourth of its original capacity. The leftover mass had been removed from the Vascular plant, and had been used to construct three additional storage chambers of the same size. None of them were large enough to hold enough Coral to trigger the Convergence at a dangerous level, and I’d had the space between all four to contain the entirety of Rubicon’s Coral.

The second step had been equally simple: Figure out how to get the thing out from underground.

That, of course, was so much easier said than done.

There was a time skip, in the game, between the end of Chapter Four and the beginning of Chapter Five. Either Arquebus captures Raven before they somehow escape, or ALLMIND freezes Raven before waking them back up to deal with Overseer. The time period is vague, but since the Vascular Plant goes from very far below ground to completely repaired and extending into orbit again, it had to be a while, right?

Well, in either scenario... Less time than you’d think.

It would only take three months, at most.

Arquebus was an interstellar megacorporation. It had casual access to such a huge amount of resources that it actually deserved that title. It was not the typical sci-fi civilization that called three cities on five planets something worthy of even being noticed, it was an entity which had fully and completely exploited the resources of entire star systems. It was barely even remarkable to a Human of this age, but the sheer scale that it operated on was so far past any point of relatability for a twenty-first century Human that the Arquebus Group was more akin to lovecraftian god.

And ALLMIND?

Frankly, she was worse. She could handle all that work by herself.

I did not have access to those resources. But, I didn’t need access to that absurd supply of resources to get shit done, I just needed to properly utilise what I did have.

There were two options. A megacorporation with full access to their available resources probably would have brought in artificial-gravity technology. It would have been obnoxiously expensive, but when the prize was Coral? Well worth it.

I did not have the facilities to construct things like that on the scale I required, but fortunately, I had a different option.

Skyrmion Generators.

Big ones.

The Xylem had them, and that was how that ship was capable of lifting off the planet. It had a bunch of Skyrmion generators throughout its structure, plugged into Drive Blocks that enabled the Xylem to push against the magnetic field of Rubicon. The entire assemblies were, somewhat incorrectly, referred to Skyrmion Engines, but what provided forward thrust was actually the Ramjet Engines, not the Skyrmion Generators.

But, that was quibbling.

Skyrmion Engines had the fun properties of getting better as they got larger. It scaled well, in other words, though there were lower limits on whether something was worth it. In terms of energy, it was still expensive, but less so than an a-grav generators, and in terms of materials?

It was much cheaper.

I had built the entire assembly slowly, over the course of the last few years. I had threaded the entirety of the structural underside with Skyrmion Generators, and then synced them all with each other. For an assembly of this size, I’d have needed the full output of several Grids in order to lift it all- but I had Coral, and fuck ton of it, so that was effectively a solved issue.

The Vascular Plant itself had fallen on something of an angle, however, and that meant that there was an uneven weight distribution above it.

As such, I had to build the entire assembly with that in mind- both that it was tipped, and also that I was going to be removing it as fast as I could.

Thankfully, that would proceed faster than digging this all out in the first place.

The hum that the Vascular Plant made as it lifted out of the ground was beyond description. It was less of a sound and more of a continuous wall of force, shaking the earth, shaking the very bones in a person’s body.

Carla raw-dogged it eagerly, enjoying the sensation because she was a madwoman. Everybody else in the city were somewhat more sensible, and had taken shelter when I’d told them what was about to happen.

It rose slowly, carefully, taking with a block of ice and earth that was so large that you could put an entire Grid Cluster on top. You could fit fucking Tokyo on top with room to spare, if you wanted to.

The lift assembly handled it like a champ.

The city was slowly exposed to above, with a long, deep slope in the earth leading downwards. Snow and wind dipped in, and a localized storm began to form as it met the warmer air. Geothermal heat made it all the more interesting.

There was nothing that nature could throw at this city that it couldn’t survive, though, and so my attention turned to another matter entirely.

The fire-filled skies above were already beginning to churn. I could feel it in my mind. The Coral sensed the main mass, sensed that it was coming closer. Small little flecks began to drift its way, and then more started moving as it came even higher.

The distance closed, slowly, and then...

Contact.

“Finally...”

I reached out as far as I could, gathering every little speck of potential within reach. I cradled them gently, bringing them safely into the calmer mass. They stayed stable, thankfully, not dissolving into each other. I’d be keeping an eye on that in order to make sure it stayed that way, and nurturing these sparks at the same time.

Of course, the Contact also strengthened the Convergence Effect. The fire in the sky rushed towards the Vascular Plant. I had planned for that, and vents all over the side opened up, letting the Coral stream in. It hit a permeable, non-newtonian liquid barrier, dousing the Coral as it came in. Burnt particulate was sifted from the rest of the mass, while the still living organisms were directed to the rest of the Coral inside the central storage.

And that was only one part of what I was doing up here.

A second deep hum joined the first, though this one was much, much quieter.

From the distance, the Xylem came in, the blue glow of its own Drive Blocks lighting the ice below it.

The Xylem was a colony ship. It had everything needed to start a civilization, and that was by modern standards, where a planet that wasn’t covered in megastructures was considered barely inhabited.

It had more industry than several Grids. It was larger than most of them, too.

Of course I was going to use it.

It didn’t have the endless supply of power from Coral, but here in the Ice Field, hydrogen wasn’t exactly hard to come by.

It slowed as it came closer, but there was already activity visible within the great vessel. Industrial-scale machines were beginning to activate, preparing for work.

It halted entirely as it came near the Vascular Plant, simply hovering in place. Now that it was in position, things swarmed.

Metal poured out of it like water, machines moving out of it in such numbers that it looked more like a cloud. The illusion was broken as they came closer and their vague, indistinct shapes came into detail.

Mining drones, which made their way to the top of the Vascular Plant, moving to the upper portions of the ice mass. Lasers activated, cutting beams puncturing deep and sweeping through the ice. Clamps activated, and they rose again, clasping chunks of ice that were like small glaciers, only slightly smaller than the machines themselves.

Fuel drones, doing basically the same thing, except they tossed the ice directly into a ravenous maw, where it was melted, electrolysed, and processed into dense hydrogen canisters. Oxygen vented outwards, and the trace materials that weren’t either hydrogen or oxygen were stored in another canister for later retrieval.

The construction drones didn’t go to the ice. Instead, they spread out, disassembly tools activating as they targeted any spare metal. Everything from the remnants of the Vascular Plant itself, to what remained of the PCA forces that still littered the Ice Field.

There were others, most of them more specialized. Scout drones, for terrain mapping and surveys. Communication drones, coordinating the swarm as it moved. Haulers, cargo drones meant to bring material back to the Xylem, most of them chasing after the construction drones.

It would have taken the megacorporations about three months to get what they wanted... But I didn’t want as much as they did.

In the end, I think that changed the balance of things.

I sent Flatwell the message to tell him that my side of things was getting started. The Coral recovery project was now in full swing- and people would notice soon enough as the Firestorms drifted further north and failed to return.

This was planned. Calculated. We had both long come to the conclusion that it simply wasn’t going to be possible to hide the existence of Coral Consciousnesses forever, and we’d only really been trying in order to make sure that the PCA didn’t attempt to do something regretful. Now that they were out of the way, a public revelation and explanation was nearly inevitable... though it wasn’t going to happen just yet. The anonymity was still useful at the moment.

Ultimately, I focused entirely on my efforts in the Ice Field.

With the assistance of all the extra machines from the Xylem, I started carving away at the ice and earth on top of the Vascular Plant. By the end of the first day, I was almost done with the ice, the mining drones ripping it all to fragments before letting it get hauled off. A decent chunk of that ice went up to the Xylem so that it could keep itself fueled.

Once we got into the rock, though? That was when I fired up the refineries.

When the lower section of the Vascular plant had been burned, most of its mass had been scattered across the Ice Field. A lot of it, in turn, had ended up buried in the ground, half-molten, half-ruined, but still perfectly viable with a bit of effort.

The Xylem took all of those resources greedily. Its refineries ignited, and then quickly sped to their full capacities as I fed it with raw materials that were of much greater purity than an untouched world would ever be able to provide.

In turn, that made the process of refining much quicker than it could have been. When the raw elemental slurry came out, it went straight into the forges and fabricators. The supply of megastructure-rated alloy started rolling off of the lines by the third day, and the, and the constructors quickly took it to its destinations.

In a circle around the area that the ICE WORM had dug out, thirty spots had been prepared, my other machines having dug deep holes into the ground with the help of the ICE WORM. The constructors were quick to transform those holes into the supporting anchors, laying down massive amounts of metal into the earth. It took two days for that to complete, and that was when they started being built upwards.

If one had watched a time lapse, it would have looked almost like organic growth. The ‘bone’, the central structural supports, grew out first, added to moment after moment by swarms of machines that were comparatively no larger than gnats and in reality made ACs look like children’s toys. The rest of it grew outwards from there, machinery, panels, cables, and weights being added to the bones. The final segments came in after all that was done, the outer plating being placed to keep it all properly safe.

The construction never stopped. No Humans were a part of this process. No rest was taken unless it was necessary to make sure it was all coming together properly. Even then, the machines didn’t stop, they just moved on to something else while that particular sector was checked.

In a week, each of those thirty spots extended upwards by five kilometres. Floating just above, the upper portion of the Vascular Plant slowly leveled out from its lopsided floating as the earth and rock was carved away piece by piece.

That was the point when I started pulling in material from the res of the Ice Field, too. Squadrons of roaming machines would wander out and pull back whatever was immediately useful. From Cavalry Units to Warships to fallen Grids to slightly underground sections of metal, the Xylem didn’t care about the source, only the throughput.

The struts kept growing, and then I started adding support between them, connecting them with long, thin bones, providing them a measure of mutual stress balancing.

As the days passed, they stretched ever further upwards, until, four weeks after I’d begun, they had been built high enough.

They stretched into the stratosphere, where the vast majority of the atmospheric Coral usually floated around. I only needed to wait a few more days before the last of the interconnecting weave was finished, and then finally I could set the Vascular Plant upon it.

I landed it as gently as I could, but ‘gentle’ is a term that was really difficult to apply to something that fucking huge. The support struts groaned as they took on that ungodly mass, but they took it nonetheless.

It had been taller, once. What was the stratosphere compared to the exosphere? Absolutely nothing.

The Skyrmion Generators slowly disengaged, the entire lift assembly winding down. It had not failed, had not needed the backups that were in place, and that I was more than a little proud of that.

Unfortunately, it was only stage one. The only part of the problem that this fixed was the atmospheric Coral, and while that was a big part, it was nowhere near all of it.

There was still so much work to do...