This made Devil’s Crater a safe haven as the natural crater and the newly built walls were perfect for keeping out anything that might threaten the people inside. Already, nations and various groups were looking to Devil’s Crater, making the move to taking up residency within Unity City.
Growing towers were being prioritized as was the DCA and the growth of Devil’s Crater, Unity, as well as the different settlements within the crater, was all expanding, with more people coming. The walls and the keeps around the crater walls were also being improved.
She looked past these important figures. Her heart seemed to shift in her chest as her hands became clammy. She unconsciously ran a hand through her hair as she looked at Alkao. He was talking to a few of the people who had stayed behind in the briefing room to go over some last details.
She gathered herself together and moved into the room past the flood of people. Aides moved through the room and cleared up what was left after the meeting.
Alkao was focused on what he was talking about with the group that had remained behind. After a few minutes, their small group collapsed and they also started to leave the room.
Alkao had a hard look on his face. He was a leader with his people, not the entirety of Emerilia now plunged into war. He had to do everything in his power to combat not only these forces but to push Devil’s Crater ahead, to make sure that they didn’t fall in the coming violence.
His eyes found Anna, softening as his hard smile became more playful and mischievous. “Anna,” Alkao said in greeting.
Anna was unable to keep a smile from forming on her face.
Alkao hadn’t hidden his affection when meeting with Anna.
Even as she lay down conditions that would have made most men turn away in defeat, he had accepted her challenge. Even through the challenges, he had carved out a place in her heart. He was a great leader, but when it was just the two of them, he was a romantic, a funny man who made every day brighter and better.
“Could we go somewhere to talk?” Anna asked.
Alkao’s eyes became thoughtful. She saw a flash of nervousness and fear in his eyes. It touched her heart, seeing him scared for what she might say.
“Sure. Let’s go to my office.” Alkao’s smile seemed a little more forced.
“Okay,” Anna said.
Alkao started to lead out of the room as Anna slid her hand into Alkao’s. He acted as if he had been shocked by lightning and paused mid-step to look at Anna in shock.
She smiled shyly up at him. His face bloomed into a smile as he moved forward, his footsteps light and quick instead of the somber footfalls from earlier.
It didn’t take long for them to reach Alkao’s office.
Alkao’s guard and secretary all saw the two of them holding hands, smiling to themselves. Anna tried to hide her head and the growing blush on her cheeks.
Finally they made it into his office. He closed the door and looked to her, unable to contain himself anymore. “What did you want to ask me?” His eyes shined and he had a wide smile on his face.
Anna couldn’t help but feel her heart beating heavily in her chest, as if she were just watching this moment. Her mind warred once again before she pushed forward. “Would you want to date me?” Anna asked, unable to stop playing with her damn hands.
She couldn’t help but be frustrated with how nervous she was.
“Yes!” Alkao said, as if he said it any slower that she might escape his grasp.
Anna bit her lip, unable to look at Alkao.
His one hand moved to the small of Anna’s back, pulling her closer; she moved without resistance as Alkao lifted her chin with his large finger. “Will you finally be my girlfriend?” The corner of Alkao’s mouth lifted in mirth.
As she looked up into those eyes, she thought of all that had happened in the last couple of weeks—the uncertainty of it all, not knowing what was going to happen.
When she had been near to despair, a single face had surfaced in her mind: that easy smile of Alkao’s when they were in private and the hard eyes and focused look when he was working. She had realized that he had made a place in her heart a long time ago. Though it had taken this crisis in order to push her past her reservations.
“Yes.” Anna smiled up at him.
Alkao looked as if he was the happiest man alive as they looked into each other’s eyes. He lowered his head. His lips found hers as he pulled her tight; her arms wrapped around him as she felt relief, as if she had come home in his embrace.
“I have something that I wanted to give to you.” Alkao’s hand finding hers as he walked to his desk, he opened a drawer pulling out a box and opened it, showing her the necklace displayed inside.
It was made from spun silver, creating a flat spiral.
“Something for you to remember Devil’s Crater wherever you go, and know that there’s someone here waiting for you,” Alkao said.
Anna smiled, not at the necklace but the meaning and the heaviness of his words as he talked. She moved her hair out of the way as Alkao put it around her neck. She let her hair drop, holding the necklace in her fingers, her eyes wet with emotions that surged through her like a comforting sea.
“Thank you.” Anna looked to Alkao.
“Who would think that after beating my ass in a dungeon you’d agree to being my girlfriend.” Alkao laughed.
Anna pouted and playfully hit his shoulder. He laughed harder, putting his arms around her and kissing her again as if he could never kiss her enough times in this life.
***
Malsour was on a cart, inspecting the progress of the asteroid base.
He watched as the beams of golden light broke through the asteroid rock. The materials were sucked up by scoops behind the beams. Carts waited behind them, gathering up these materials into storage chests before shooting off toward the portals that would allow them to take this back to the ice planet to be refined.
“How’s it going?” Dave asked in a private chat before teleporting right next to Malsour, making him jump.
“Would be better if I didn’t have the human jack-in-the-box making me jump out of my skin!” Malsour got his breathing under control. He let out a frustrated noise. “I like it better when you weren’t testing out your teleportation magic. You’d be pretty deadly with that.”
“Oh, I know and it was also why I was so willing to let Deia participate in fighting or at least be near it when she was pregnant with Koi. If anything went wrong, then I could teleport her away in the blink of an eye,” Dave said seriously.
“Well, that’s good to know.” Malsour glanced at the miners. “I never thought that our projects would turn into anything on this scale. I still don’t quite understand it all.”
“It is pretty damn impressive. It it still hasn’t sunk in for me.” Dave sighed.
“I know,” Malsour said. “Me either. Though it’s here now so we have to do something with it.”
“I was wondering if I could use your mind for something that I’ve been thinking on,” Dave said.
“What is it?”
“Teleportation related and I also want to go over the new designs for the battleships and destroyers,” Dave said.
“Okay,” Malsour said. They disappeared from in front of the miners and appeared next to the portal.
Dave stepped through, Malsour following right behind him.
As soon as he was through, Dave teleported them both to the workshop and laboratory buildings that were filled with people working on different projects or coming to understand them.
Ela-Dorn was in the room, sitting in a chair, her hand on a Mirror of Communication.
Dave swiped his hand over the surface of the workstation in front of them. A complicated series of spell formations appeared in midair, overlapping one another.
“What does it do?” Malsour looked at it.
“Well, we’ve been looking at what the flying citadels are doing with dropping everyone off and I had to think that there is a better way to drop o
ff troops than have them use those teardrop backpacks,” Dave said.
“Okay.” Malsour waved for Dave to go on.
“This is what I call teleportation drop. I know it needs work but anyway—these spell formations would be turned into runic lines that people could stand on. Then we cast a spell on the ground below the runic lines, use that as an anchor and we send people to the surface,” Dave said.
“Okay, so basically we have a teleport but it only teleports people to whatever’s below it,” Malsour said.
“Exactly! So we could have a whole bunch of say War Clans—they’re standing inside these teleportation circles, then we just drop them right onto the battlefield. Instant reinforcements!” Dave smiled.
“Okay, that does sound like a good idea, but that anchor—there has been a reason that we’ve been using drop pads and the portal anchors,” Malsour said.
“Yes, but this anchor isn’t crossing three-dimensional space, a lot less things to deal with. Here the anchor is basically making sure that we don’t stick people in the ground.” Dave’s excitement built.
“I don’t think that we should tell the people that we’re going to be using this on that we might stick them into the ground.”
“Well, of course not. We’re going to fix that up before it happens,” Dave said.
“Okay, well, it makes sense to me.” The more Malsour looked at the spell formations, the more he could understand what it was trying to do.
“Now the other thing that I want your help on.” Dave flicked his hand, using the interface menu to change what they were looking at.
Two large ships appeared. One was a kilometer long, the other about three hundred meters long.
“Okay, so these are our designs for the battleships and the destroyers. The destroyers were made to be a multi-platform ship. Though the more I talk with the people who have been going through history and are working to become buffs on this stuff, the more I’m starting to think that we should make them farther apart. Able to cover the other’s weaknesses. What the eggheads have been thinking is to adapt the battleship so that it is faster and can move between atmosphere and space. However, the destroyers will be a complete space warship. They can then have much heavier armor, better long-range weapons, and fusion reactors dedicated to the shields and Mana barriers.
“The battleships are good for close-in defense and patrols but they’re not good to slug it out. That will be the destroyer’s job. We can fit the destroyers with the new jump drive while the battleships can just use portal jumping. The destroyers clear the area, then call in the missile boats and battleships through portals,” Dave said.
“It’s a good thing that the flight drives run off gravity and Mana so it doesn’t matter if they’re in atmosphere or space—they’ll still work. This scale up on the destroyer—it’s going tot cost a lot more resources than we originally thought.” Malsour looked at the ship.
“Yes, but it will still take about the same time as the battleship to make. The destroyer is much bigger and its armor plates are really simple. The battleship, however, is streamlined to make sure that it doesn’t face too much resistance when moving from atmosphere to vacuum,” Dave said.
“Which brings us to the automatons. How has development gone with those?”
“Well, the Aleph we’ve got are looking into it and we’ve got Jeeves running through multiple simulations to see which of them would be the best for our needs. It looks more and more like we’re going to have to make multiple types for all kinds of jobs.” Dave scratched his head.
“Which means multiple factories, which means more time up front to build up the infrastructure to create them,” Malsour added.
“Yep, but thankfully we have all of these people here so it’s coming along a lot faster than I thought. We should have finalized ideas within a few days, it looks like. But anyway, back to the ship types,” Dave said.
“I think it’s smart. We’ve got missile boats heavy on armor and defenses, with storage crates filled with hundreds of missiles. Those are good for just saturating the enemy’s defenses with weapons fire— make their defense work for it. Then we’ve got the battleships that can wade through the fires of hell to reach the Jukal ships and smash them apart at long range and up close. I would think about even increasing the power on the engines. With the inertia information that we’ve got from Sato’s people, we can handle a lot more gravities on these ships and still be fine.
“Let’s use that to our advantage. The destroyers have missiles and weapons. And they’ve got high speed, and can enter and exit planets. They have less armor and have way less striking power than the battleships but they can escort them and enhance their striking abilities.” Malsour looked at the ships.
“Someone has been doing their homework.” Dave smiled.
“Well, we’re making a fleet of warships— I thought it might be a good idea to know how to use them and what they’re going to be doing. I was thinking of bringing it up before but we just didn’t have the resources in order to have multiple kinds of ships. With all of the bases and what we have now, it’s possible for us to increase our striking power and our abilities.”
“Good. That was what I was thinking, too.” Dave pressed another command on the console. The ships started to change, with their weapons and emplacements being pulled out and changed, as well as their forms. Their armor changed shape and also densities.
It was as if someone had gone over them and started to remove all of the useless extras and beefed up what needed to be touched.
Malsour looked at the final products.
The battleship was shaped like an octagonal prism. Mana shield nodules covered the ship. Runic lines ran across it, lighting it up with an ethereal glow. Flight drives lay on either end of the ship and then along its body to allow it to maneuver in every direction. Heavy armor covered the surface of the ship as rows of massive heavy cannons lined the different faces of the battleship. Missile ports were sealed up, ready to launch.
Looking upon the ship, Malsour felt reassured. This was a ship of war seemed to combine clean lethal lines while seeming dominating at the same time.
The Destroyer was much smaller. It was streamlined with two wings midway up it's body for atmospheric flight and they also held missile racks and even a few smaller cannon attachment points.
armor was more polished and less rough, with lighter weapons and less missile ports than the larger battleship.
“The destroyer will have the drop teleporting ability that I was talking about earlier, allowing it to move into hostile territory and drop off reinforcements quickly. It will have surface-to-space as well as space-to-space missiles. It will have automated cannon turrets that can fire all types of rounds, from the plasma cannon rounds to the nuclear warhead grand workings. When entering and exiting atmosphere, it’s going to be pretty nimble, but people better be strapped the hell down. Wait—we’ll just boost the power of the gravity runes and we should get Jeeves to code out something that will make it so that everyone’s good at all times. It’s damn useful having an AI around.”
“Good to know my services are appreciated,” Jeeves said from the ceiling.
“Hello, Jeeves.” Malsour smiled. Jeeves was the hardest working of them all. In the beginning, they had needed to code everything by themselves. Now they coded some of the more complex stuff that Jeeves didn’t understand. Like Dave’s portals. Though, for the most part, they could tell Jeeves what they wanted and he could whip up a code to be inserted into a soul gem construct and with enough power it could be built. It was why and how they were able to change between designs like they were now.
If they were an Earth military, then they could adapt their designs but to change them completely, they would have to remake the entire hull, rip out everything and try again.
“Hello, Malsour. Did the miners within the asteroid belt meet your approval?” Jeeves asked.
“Yes, they did. Good work,” Malsour said.
“Thank y
ou,” Jeeves said. The AI didn’t get any happier than when someone praised him on doing a good job. When something went wrong, he would sit over the shoulder of whoever was working on the project and try to help them figure out what went wrong. He was a perfectionist and within Pandora’s Box that was necessary.
“Jeeves, do you want to tell Malsour the specs on the battleship?” Dave asked.
“The battleship has multi-layered armor, similar to the armor used by the Devastator suits. Once impacted, the layers of soul gem within the metal will repair itself and then where it has been hit; as long as the ship is powered, it will recover. It has five large fusion reactors, ten small reactors like the one within Pandora’s Box on Emerilia. It has twenty-four Mana wells that are spread throughout. The soul gem construct within all of these ships is the most complicated construct ever made. It is grown on a reinforced and runed metallic superstructure made up of a Mithril composite.”
“Wait—what? A Mithril composite?” Malsour interrupted.
“With the information from Earth, the Jukal Empire, as well as the various texts from the dwarves, we were able to work out how to make the Mithril composite. It is rather expensive to make but with our large amounts of resources, it is not impossible. With this surplus, we have been looking at using it with a combination of other materials in different processes to retain the integral strength of the Mithril material without having to use just purely Mithril. With this composite material, we are able to have that strength throughout the battleship. It is actually needed in order to support all of the armor as well as the acceleration you two have been talking about. A lesser material could warp and then the entire ship could break apart or have weaknesses.
“The Mithril composite material is part of the superstructure that the soul gem construct is grown upon. The soul gem construct will look after things like power distribution, breathable atmosphere, command and control circuits for the various items within the ship. It will also be able to seal off sections of the ship that are heavily damaged and repair them. It can also act as a reservoir of power for the different magical coding within it. All of the coding will be compressed to runic lines but can be altered at any time To do that at the ship level, Administration rights would need to be assigned and delegated. Also, with having the soul gem construct as the base material, it is possible to replace out items like burnt-out Mana barrier coding automatically. As Mana shields go down from overheating, then you could code in heat exchangers that remove the excess heat or replace the soul gem construct completely. With Earth warships and Jukal Earth ships, it is necessary to take out banks of hardware stacks and replace them out due to overheating or damage. Also, they are more likely to have faults. Any issues that are detected by me will automatically be repaired so that there is no loss in functionality,” Jeeves said with some pride.
Of Myths and Legends (Emerilia Book 9) Page 23
