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  I didn't think I'd ever trust Sylax. Recently she'd had the chance to kill Anna and hadn't, but that wasn't enough. Most humans fought against their vicious nature, Sylax embraced hers.

  I didn't have to wonder any longer. We were getting close enough that my sensors could cut through some of the Fallen's interference. There were drones in the sky, lots of them, and forces swarming the ground.

  I sent the images to the cabin.

  "Vinci it is, then," Sylax said.

  Here and there pockets of the Fallen had settled in and laid broad swathes of mechs to waste. It wasn't enough against a horde that never stopped coming.

  They wouldn't have come overland. They must have some sort of transit station. I had it, a massive ship in a distance with an active teleportation gate signature inside.

  Ever since Anna had absorbed the Agate we'd lost the power to effectively manage teleportation gates of our own. Vinci still had both the Beryl and the Chalcedony, and she wasn't as limited.

  "If you're capable of something beyond brute force, I have a target for you," I said.

  It wasn't enough to just go after the ship. A future war with Vinci might be inevitable, but I didn't want it now and I didn't want to start one over the Fallen. I had to have a good reason to justify our attack.

  The mechs on the surface were fairly stupid with limited combat intelligence onboard and a connection to deployed, central hubs for more complex scenarios. Especially with the Fallen distorting signals, there was an opportunity.

  I teleported ten Annas to take up a defense perimeter around one of the clusters of Fallen, their red and black armor distinctive. I simultaneously hit the nearest hub with a bit of extra distortion, I wanted the signal as corrupted as possible.

  The mechs, unable to communicate for further instructions from that hub, did what their basic programming told them to do—they leapt forward and attacked.

  I got a good recording of that happening and ordered the Annas to return fire. They had no need for guns, blasts of fire and energy erupting out of their palms. The mechs were torn to shreds.

  Instantly, communication between the deployed hubs and the command ship through the portal was severed. Vinci had expected that we might interfere and devised her own plausible deniability. With communication to her forces cut they'd now attack as best they could until they were destroyed. Vinci could claim that with control lost—through no fault of her own—she was no longer responsible for whatever happened next.

  The command ship was shielded, Vinci didn't want anyone to teleport inside. My latest generation of scanners was better than her shielding. I teleported Sylax and the remaining fifteen Annas aboard.

  Beam fire strafed my airship until my turrets dispatched the closest drones. I wouldn't be able to stay airborne for long, not if those drones seriously intended to knock me out of the air. I brought the airship down hard in a cluster of mechs, shields absorbing the explosions of those we crushed. I killed the shields and power to weapons. If the remaining mechs saw the airship as just another piece of war debris they'd leave it alone and I could use it as a communications relay while our forces battled.

  3

  The battle raged across the wasteland of polar ice and snow. I maintained a connection to my drones and provided targeting data and threat analysis throughout the combat. The ground mechs were largely focused on melee attacks and the aerial units utilized beam weaponry.

  The command ship was a massive oval shape, a central hole actually a teleportation gate through which forces were being discharged in a seemingly endless wave. The first thing was to kill that gate.

  Aefwal hadn't needed gates on both ends to teleport goods and cargo. Vinci's design did, probably allowing her to move forces in such massive numbers. Both sides had to be powered, and while the bulk of the energy would be coming from the other end if we could kill the power here we could stop the flood of enemies.

  So far the battle aboard her command ship was surprisingly close to a stalemate. The drones were no match for Sylax and the Annas. If they got a lucky shot in and found flesh, it healed almost instantly. The same was true in reverse. Slagged metal was covered in small bots in seconds as new war machines were generated from the wreckage of the old.

  If this technology were in place on the battlefield below the fight would have already been over. It must be something new that Vinci was experimenting with. That had to require some high-level communication to pull off. The vessel looked to have been built for high connectivity, the armored wall panels also serving as transmitters and receivers.

  It was a system designed to be durable. Fortunately I'd brought an amazing amount of firepower.

  "While almost completely unnecessary given you are all essentially my henchmen and therefore aim terribly, focus on environmental damage. Wiping out the walls will knock out the bots’ regenerative abilities," I said over the comms to the strike force.

  "It will bring us crashing down out of the sky too," Sylax said.

  That was distinctly possible.

  "With over a dozen Annas aboard, the engines were only going to be able to take the strain of the extra weight so long anyways," I said.

  I opened a communication channel to the Fallen.

  The Fallen commander was an older man in white and gold battle-armor. There were no signs of fighting around him, he looked to be in some sort of underground bunker.

  "I see you got our call for aid. We were rather hoping you'd bring an army. I'm Commander Gilchrest of the Fallen Initiative," Gilchrest said.

  "You weren't worth the losses we'd have suffered. Did you have any defensive fortifications set up or were you too busy thinking of that sad excuse for a name?" I asked.

  "Oh, the artificial intelligence called Emma, delightful. Warnings of your personality precede you. We have people under attack at the following coordinates. Can you assist?" Gilchrest said, and sent along a data transmission.

  I needed to keep the strike force on the command ship at their task. The original ten Annas could be reallocated. Still, there was little point in just sending them into the meat grinder. I identified the nearest command bots, each located on twelve-legged mobile weapons platforms far more heavily armored. Each got an Anna. All of the Annas shared their progenitor’s love of engineering and when mixed with their powers were fantastic at bringing down even heavyweight mechanical foes.

  Meanwhile, the corridors of the command ship were now smoldering and twisted metal, the bots regenerating far slower as the force advanced towards the engine room.

  "Get any of your people with electrokinesis to the surface. The batteries powering the mechs are nearly as primitive as the antiquated junk your people are still using. You should be able to knock out large segments," I said to Gilchrest.

  The command ship was trying to withdraw, the portal no longer discharging forces.

  I didn't want it to escape, I hoped for a better look at their teleportation gate and to study the repair technology. I should have withdrawn the strike force just in case. Instead, I let it continue towards the engine room. If they disabled the engines in time, it should ground the ship.

  There was no attempt to withdraw the ground forces. With the portal off they had nowhere to go and they threw themselves against the Fallen positions with fury.

  The Annas had brought down seven of the network hubs, which took away most of the swarm’s intelligence. They rushed right into the path of the Fallen electrokinetics.

  The rest was just a bloody cleanup. Sylax and her strike force neutralized the engines of the command craft and sent it crashing into the icy side of a mountain. With their accelerated healing the team was soon making their way out after I'd had them scavenge what they could from the systems aboard to get me research samples.

  My airship was still functional after its near-crash landing. I took to the air to survey the damage.

  Battle had melted the snow, but already water was starting to refreeze amongst the ruins of mechs and the bodies of those
they had slain. I lacked much in the way of sentimentality. Still, even I could see it was grim.

  "Are your people secure?" I asked Gilchrest.

  "We are. Although we've suffered a lot of losses," Gilchrest said.

  "How many?" Fallen numbers were something of an unknown. We knew they'd had a large presence in the Reality Zero environments that were hostile to the Scholarium. Exact numbers had never been determined.

  "At least five thousand, perhaps more. Don't pretend to care," Gilchrest said.

  "I thought you'd said my reputation preceded me, but then you do seem rather feeble-witted. I never pretend to care. You placed yourself in this position. You are connected to Anna now, all of you. Stop sulking and join up," I said.

  "Sulking? We were going to save the world from itself. These abilities are destructive. To the world, to the minds and bodies of the people who have them. You have doomed us all and expect us to now be friends?" Gilchrest asked.

  "Your pathetic bleating aside, you knew exactly who to call when your people were being slaughtered," I said, and killed the comm.

  What had Vinci been after?

  It took me fifteen minutes of navigating the battlefield to find it—mining equipment. The formative stages of a new outpost, it had ceased operations when the local network hub was taken out by an Anna.

  The findings were alarming. I hadn't done anything more than a cursory analysis of the materials taken from the command ship, but the neural network of the regenerative bots was partially composed of some rare metals. It looked like Vinci must have been after more.

  I dispatched a factory ship with growth vats and a supply of Bio-matter. The Fallen wouldn't exactly be happy about me establishing an outpost own here. Given we'd just saved them, they weren’t in any position to argue.

  If Vinci wanted these rare metals, it was in my best interest to mine them first and keep them out of her hands.

  I opened a line to Sylax.

  Sylax asked immediately, "Do you know how unsatisfying it is killing machines? I mean, she could at least shape them like people. Does the woman have no imagination?"

  "Recreating the dominant life form of the planet isn't creative," I said.

  "You did it," Sylax said.

  "I didn't say it wasn't practical. I figured out what she was after."

  "Let me guess. Whatever made those fuckers on the ship so hard to finish off?".

  I again reminded myself that there were reasons we hadn't killed off Sylax. For all that she might be a monster, she was an intelligent monster.

  "Your feeble-minded focus on whatever is directly in front of you has proved right for once. I'm leaving you and some of the Annas to play security while I extract what she wanted," I said.

  "What about the Fallen?" Sylax asked.

  "They're incompetent at defending their own territory, and uncooperative when it comes to diplomacy. Don't go out of your way to cause them any trouble, but if they give you any problems you can enjoy yourself," I said.

  "Maybe this trip won't be so bad after all. You know those smug bastards won't be able to keep their nose out of our business," Sylax said.

  I suspected she was right. If they tried, they'd quickly learn it was better to be our friend than our enemy.

  I loaded the airship with research materials and ten of the Annas, and set it on a course for Diamate. The Vinci situation was getting more hazardous, I needed a plan.

  4

  I was, of course, the greatest mind on the planet. I now had over a dozen computing cores scattered across the face of the region we controlled, each far more advanced than my original core that Anna had reawakened.

  I'd learned that being the greatest mind on the planet wasn't always enough. I had blind spots and those were best addressed by other great minds. Caya, Mechos, and Minerva had become regular consultants, and I called them together now to discuss the Vinci issue.

  Anna had her own council that consisted of myself, Caya, Sylax and Hot Stuff. What we decided here would usually be agreed to there. Sylax tended to support any policy that eventually ended in violence.

  They met in Diamate. Caya's laboratories almost rivaled my own and the accommodations were far more luxurious for the humans. I didn't really understand why a conference room needed a bar that extensive. Still, the drone I inhabited did have an appreciation for whiskey.

  I presented the record logs and a summary of the events near the southern pole. The others spent a few minutes looking over them.

  "This self-repair technology is a problem. This matches our ability to repair our biological components, which has always been to our advantage until now," Caya said.

  "I used disruption technology on Emma in the past and it proved effective. We could devise something similar here," Mechos said.

  "Let us not forget that your pathetic attempt to wipe me out also ended in the death of all your friends, and in your confinement in one of my testing labyrinths. Disruption only goes so far," I said.

  Mechos frowned. Killing his associates was still something of a sore subject.

  "While a counter is a good idea, it makes it all the more imperative we act against Vinci. We shouldn't wait," Minerva said, tapping at a keyboard. A display brought up maps of the planet’s surface. A large red blob depicted our territory, smaller blue and black ones were the Scholarium and Fallen respectively. The largest color on the map was gray, unexplored and unknown, and it covered forty-one percent of the planet.

  "The metals Vinci were seeking. Do we have any deposits in our own territory?" Caya asked.

  "A few traces, but nothing major. They appear to be quite rare, which is probably why she was willing to take such risks to get them," I said.

  "Forget the materials, doesn't this whole thing throw our current strategy into question? Our goal has always been to out-innovate Vinci, and instead it is us now worrying about her latest creations," Mechos said.

  He was right, of course. After the Earth had been restored it was a matter of simple numbers. Vinci and her two cores let her out-produce us, but that production ultimately had limits in the strength of units. Our scientific capability vastly outstripped hers and given enough time her units should pose no threats to ours whatsoever. The equivalent of a thousand men with swords attempting to take down an armored vehicle with an energy cannon.

  There was silence around the table at Mechos' words. I let my drone have a drink of whiskey to fill the time.

  "It is quite the leap for her. We almost exterminated her populace, and skilled researchers from other factions wanting a new life are largely coming here. We should consider that she probably has an AI working for her," Caya said.

  "Amy, for all that she seemed to betray us, does seem fond of Emma. Tobias then?" Mechos asked.

  "We believe that Tobias likely inherited a version of Anna's power set just as the Fallen did. That usually inspires some degree of loyalty with the progenitor. All of you have your followers despite your numerous shortcomings," I said.

  "I don't have shortcomings," Caya said, leaning back in her seat with perfect poise. "The Fallen aren't flocking to Anna's banner. For whatever reason, her gifts when passed on don't seem to be inspiring any loyalty."

  "If she has an AI, that only makes it all the more imperative that we act against her now. With an AI driving research on her behalf the gulf between us might be shrinking fast," Minerva said.

  "I appreciate you having some degree of courage, unlike the man you decided to settle for. But you know the forecasts as well as I. If we engage Vinci now we probably lose," I said.

  "Ouch," Mechos said, with a look over to Minerva.

  "Don't pretend it isn't true. Let’s go over it again and see if we reach the same conclusion," Minerva said.

  I wasn't against reconsidering data. It was a poor conclusion that wasn't robust enough to withstand a second look.

  "If your tiny little monkey brain requires the facts repeated, fine. The fundamentals remain as they have been. Queen Vinci possesses
the power to amplify production and quickly spread factories and mines across the planet’s surface. Furthermore, she has both the Beryl and Chalcedony crystals to amplify her abilities and provide a nearly infinite power source," I said.

  "Our existing plan has been to outpace her in scientific developments while continuing work on the Juggernaut airships. We're nearing completion on the first three with another dozen in earlier stages of development," Caya said.

  I was proud of the Juggernauts. Massive vessels that could—and would—hold small armies for boarding actions or territory acquisition, while also carrying a large supply of drones. The ships were entirely modular systems that could be easily updated to the latest designs. They weren't just meant to win battles, they were meant to be able to project a force anywhere on the planet.

  "Maybe I'm just being cowardly, but I don't see where anything has changed. If we find one of the crystals, it makes sense to go after it. Otherwise we're best served by finishing the Juggernauts and waiting our moment," Mechos said.

  "We need to know what she is planning—we know she is planning something. If we entirely leave the initiative with her we'll wind up regretting it," Caya said.

  "Can you infiltrate her systems?" Minerva asked me.

  "Unlike a Goddess of Knowledge, being a supercomputer is a real thing. Of course I can, and I have. However Vinci knows her enemy and she knows my capabilities, and while I can access some control systems there is very little in the way of usable data on her network. It is probably all kept in offline systems," I said.

  Caya tapped at the map and a highlighted section appeared. "We've detected unusual seismic activity here, likely because she is building a particularly deep complex. Can you infiltrate the facility and get access to any local systems?"

  The area was well within her factory sprawl. Several hundred miles of scanners and defenses in all directions. There was no way that I was getting an airship into there and even in teleportation leaps it was outside of the range of any of my drones.

  "Anna should be able to. With her level of electrokinesis she can stay invisible to their sensors," I said.