Chapter 398 - Far Future Ch. 108 – Oh, it’s one of THOSE Quests... (1/2)

So, the ship's AI was happy to provide us with schematics and support once we got up coms with us, and even advised us on a proper format for a databand until it found out we were using vakker-tech to better withstand the pulses of the Throne field sweeping through on a regular basis.

It was a TL 15 printer, which meant it could largely print off and assemble any kind of tech up to TL 14, which was pretty darn radical. Tech at that level was usually restricted to high nobility and the Mekkers, because it was so darn sweet and juicy.

We were both salivating as we reviewed schematics of some of the tech and weapons accessible with this thing. It wasn't all new, per se, and there were even some improvements on systems made over the millennia, but basically this was stuff only the elite of the Imperium ever got to see.

And see, there were whole fabber-bays with this kind of stuff around, making spare parts for the ship, recycling old material, making new bots as old ones wore out, new ammunition, and the like.

It was one of the things that drove the 'vores and 'syms off the ship, the relentless production of fighting bots operating with computerized efficiency, cleaning up those destroyed, recycling them to fight over and over again, more efficiently than even the 'syms could do, as the bots started flaming biomatter to make sure they couldn't just come back again.

Naturally, those uncounted numbers of bots had long since been powered down, or recycled into other forms. It still left a whole bunch of them available for activation when they sensed an intruder in their material stores and came zipping in to investigate.

Constructs are generally grouped into two categories: robots, and golems. Robots were strictly technological, computer-guided artificial beings of any sort, including cyberized humans once limb and organ replacement started, as opposed to just supplemental chrome. Golems were stuff that had spirits, and were 'alive', but bound to an inorganic form. If magical, these were things like iron, stone statues, ivory figures, clay carvings, wooden effigies, and even reanimated corpses that weren't undead, like Frankenstein's monster. If psionic, they tended to be more crystalline, or with psychoplasm, and in various forms... but being alive, Vampire's Veil would fool a robot, but not a golem.

As they could have some intelligence, golems often formed the heart of construct forces, being efficient, emotionless item spirits capable of responding to changes in events with at least some degree of intelligence. Wed them to a broad enough tactical base, and they could react very appropriately to new events.

But golems couldn't be made by artificial means, they needed that spark that came from psionics or magic to actually work, and in some cases involved actively binding the spirit of something to the shell it would inhabit, which could be human, demon, alien, or a mix of them, depending on what was involved here.

I'd gone further up the ship, towards the sensor areas and computer labs that dominated the front of the ship, where a bunch of the ship's finer production fabbers were located, and thus the materials to feed them. Raiding the stores hadn't been too awful hard, and until that golem had actually spotted me and fixed its six antennae on me, I'd actually been walking through the quietly humming area without too much problem.

There wasn't a lot of activity on the part of the bots, and universally they stayed out of the central core and refused to do anything other than dust, run maintenance checks, and clean up loose shards of glass. They hadn't replaced the tubes with new ones, which wasn't a good sign, and generally their repairs were incredibly selective. Doors damaged by psionic attacks were left open instead of fixed, and most major damage was still obvious after the millennia. Minor damage was often fixed and polished away, but anything that looked to have been inflicted by psionic power had been left there, as if it couldn't be fixed, or even acknowledged.

Still, there was nothing like demon-possessed robots up here, the farthest from the pulse, and I didn't even try to get into the system here, the machine language and programming was probably above my tier. Maybe not, just because they could make at TL 14 didn't mean all the stuff was made at that level...

I plummeted down the central shaft, hair spread out to catch the air, give me instant control if needed, and take me out of the range of any bots.

There were no monofilament nets or anything to cut me apart, so I was in no danger coming down, although I was looking at every balcony and access point as I fell past them, making robot forces poised on several of them... but not necessarily from the same AI I was running from.

The Command Balcony came up on me, Cloudstepping Sandals vented momentum, and I skied down onto it and into the hall beyond before my lightfoot sent me skating in, pushing my Disk of materials ahead of me.

Briggs was in the captain's workroom still, but the tech printer was up and humming, various moving parts and limbs doing this and that with energy fields, melting, cutting, fusing, and laying them down, sometimes in layers only an atom thick at a time.

Briggs grinned at the sight of the stacked crates and containers when I glided in. ”Nice.” He flipped me a bracelet, which I slapped on. I'd already seen the relay out on the access balcony, and another in the hallway on the way here.

”Hello, Tribute!” I told it, slapping it onto my arm. I could interface with it, but I figured that was a surprise that could wait until we had the Purifier built and got the AI plugged into it. Even if it rated as a golem with an Item Spirit, it was still going to have to be cleansed.

”Good evening, Duchess Sama. Did you retrieve any droids I might be able to use?”

I began to set boxes and crates aside here and there, and opened up a crate on the bottom, full of what looked like scattered spare parts. ”I disassembled a dozen different models and threw them in here.” I picked up a scouting drone, held it next to the Band, and there was some beeping and speaking. The props and anti-grav on the unit kicked on together, and it whirred quietly to life.

The Tribute had been blind for quite some time, and the lenses of the drone looked over us both in interest, scanning and collating us. ”A pleasure to see you both, Your Graces.” A scan of laser light played over the components in the box. ”I can guide you in reassembling these bots, Your Grace. Would you like to begin?”

”Sure. Let's go into the other room and give the Duke some room to work.” I hefted a quarter-ton of depowered and disassembled bot parts in my arms, leaving Briggs to go through the rest of the pre-sorted stuff and organize it for the printer to use. ”Have you got a breakdown of what the Duke and I have to do to get you all hooked up again?”

”I regret to inform Your Grace that by my calculations, you are very unlikely to have enough firepower to accomplish the task. You will probably need to recruit a fairly sizable military force.”