Flowered Metal

Two weeks later, Valley of the Ancients, Northern Frontier of Tress Kingdom…

[ /// PATROL COMMENCING; AO Bravo entered…

>>Loading Patrol Roster…

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> REAPER-01

{AGM-114 = 8, Flight time remaining = 89 minutes}

> REAPER-02

{AGM-114 = 8, Flight time remaining = 90 minutes}

______

/PATROL PARAMETERS; Investigate lack of Adventurers…

>ORIGIN; Gen. Oki…

>APPROVED BY SYFA ]

A colored video feed appeared before Opal of the Fort south of the Ark. The same fort that Syfa and her brother had been to and where her pursuers who attacked them originated from. It also acted as a base of operations for the adventurers who began to patrol the forests. And in the last six months, Opal had enforced the Hikari’s boundaries a total of 27 times. This amounted to a total of 54 casualties on the adventurer’s side. 10 dead and the rest of varying degrees of injured.

In a sense, Opal wasn’t pleased to have these altercations, but such was the way of things. She was the controlling Forward Operating Warmind AI aboard the crashed Omega Ark. After a time, the Hikari tribe also began to see her as a protector and savior. Both of which were not an issue to herself, rather, she enjoyed the increase of options that had been laid at her proverbial holographic fingers. She was not the leader of the Hikari, opting to only control things within the sphere of her ship – she also shot it down if anyone joked about it. Opal refused to allow any festering notion she wanted to take over the Hikari.

While Opal’s programming had listed the who and what, along with appropriate contextual factors needed, to who could request or order her to do things; she felt a compulsion in her to want to appease her newfound friends, along with their loved ones and family. This had put the AI into a corner. There had been an unspoken cease-fire for some time. If the other side noticed she was now making expeditions into their side of the valley, Opal understood that the uneasy peace that had been established would end.

Despite the time between the human forces attacking the Hikarai Village and now, the beastpeople still suffered from the lasting effects. Syfa had been consulting with Opal about the night terrors and skittishness that had plagued the villagers now. Even Oki had been known to wake screaming in the night. To calm their fears, Opal’s IFV was now permanently stationed at the village center.

An interesting development was that her spiders began to patrol on their own – quite loudly at that, around evening and through the night… Something she knew she had to look into, but oddly… She didn’t want to. Thus, let this behavior develop.

Back to the operation –

Opal’s first log of the fort town painted it as a lax settlement. Thus, to no one's surprise given all the events that passed, it was now quite the fortified position. What Opal was now mapping as its outer ring, encompassing all that the warmind deemed the town’s sphere of control, was more clearly defined. The forest had been cut down 30 meters beyond its original boundary around the town. That border had been clearly defined by a well-beaten path, posted with watch towers at certain intervals.

The roads around the farmlands on the outskirts that were once ragged and unorganized were now straightened. A quick scan also showed that the plots had been combined as well to fit within whatever clear infrastructure plan they now had. It followed the markings of a clock, putting each guard tower on each number on the clock - forgoing the 6 and 12. Both being the rear and front gates respectively. As R-01 circled on its 3 o’clock, noticed that there was a human-sized door on that side as well. It was safe to assume that there would be another one on the 9.

But Opal wasn’t human, and she rarely left things to chance if she could help it. Thus, R-02 circled on and had a visual confirmation.

With the outer ring mapped, the feed moved inward to establish what she was now calling the inner ring, or the town proper. Their town’s stone wall had thickened enough for three men to walk side by side on the forest front. At the moment, they were slowly working their way to the 6 o’clock of the town. But it was clear their progress was slow as they’d only gotten to the 10 and 2 o’clock. Panning across the entire wall revealed several large staging points of material for it.

Both drones moved their cameras to observe the inner town itself.

Many of the buildings from before were there, but a large portion had been cleared around its central plaza. Large piles of materials had been stockpiled. Two freshly constructed mid-sized buildings (comparative to the largest building center of the town itself), with several large-foot print foundations marked with tens of workers mulling about. They measured and talked amongst themselves. To be noted, there was a large presence of armored humans, dressed similarly to the ones that had attacked the old village. Yet their style was slightly different.

Their appearance looked streamlined and unadorned aside from the strange emblem center chest. The differences were starkly contrasted since there were a few humans in the armor that matched the aforementioned humans. They were gilded with designs and looked fitted to their forms. It co-sided with the large red flag that now hung over the town... She would need more information to judge the situation.

Why were they fortifying the town? Why was there an influx of troops? Were they expanding their territory, or was it the beginning of an incursion on her? Who were the new forces?

It did not matter if they were friendlies or enemies. If they were going to expand their territory, all she had to do was expand hers to accommodate the Hikari’s needs. She would also need raw resources to feed her machines, thus the mountains on her sides would be a good place to start. It would also offer her a good staging area for artillery units. She had the schematics. She could transition into wartime without an issue…

Opal was worried for the Hikari.

She gave the recall order, and the drones returned to the base. Landing the newly established runway atop the Omega Ark.

Like the town, Opal hadn’t been idle in these last six months. The Omega had been grounded between two peaks, creating a large lake in its wake. At its front, it had created a smaller, narrower lake. The amount of destruction caused in the crashlanding was enough to dash any hope of it reaching for the heavens once more. Thus, Opal had been tearing it apart and reconfiguring it section by section. Now, despite the majority of the ship still was just a wreck, the AI had transformed any sections with openings into a formidable bunker.

A river had formed from the front, twisting its way through several corridors until it emptied the port-side stern. To her amazement, it crossed over dozens of cooling pipes to the reactor and single-handedly prevented a cataphoric explosion of her reactor of the years. Since it had done a fine job of this, Opal solidified the layout while reinforcing the piping and routes for safety and security. Where the water exited, she “cauterized” it to prevent rust.

There were also plans on the table to create secondary waterways for the aquatic life to return upstream at Syfa’s request.

Opal transferred from the drones as they taxied automatically to large elevator platforms at the front of the Omega. Back in the digital representation of her Net, the AI looked at the floating hologram that was the ship’s connected systems. Most of it was online, however, was either red or yellow. All the green portions were renovated sections that were to accommodate her drones rather than humans. They could support living beings, but there were no creature comforts. Only straight halls with large square cavities that housed spider cubbies, or larger drones.

That excluded her core and the reactor, as they were they had the most armor and support structures to protect them in events such as a crash landing. The proverbial black box.

[/// STRUCTURE REPORT; Compiled…

> Ship; CRASHED = REFERB IN PROGRESS

… 50% completed..

{CORE= OKAY}

{REACTOR = OKAY}

{Auto-Forge = OKAY}

{Weapons = ERROR

— Manifest errors found. ALL weapons are to be moved into the new armory when found.}

{Munitions = ERROR

— Manifest errors found. Non-listed munitions are to be stored until their appropriate arms are determined if viable. }

{Light Frames = ERROR

— Manifest errors found. Non-listed frames are to be recycled.}

{Heavy Frames = ERROR

— Manifest errors found. Non-listed frames are to be recycled.}

{Aerial Frames = ERROR

— Aerial bays damaged. Manifest missing. All units are subject to inspection & possible recycling.}

{Human Vehicles = ERROR

– Manifest errors found. ALL vehicles are to be recycled.}

{Life Support = OFFLINE

– Life support systems heavily damaged. System offline.}

{Flight systems = OFFLINE

– Flight Systems offline due to crash.}

{Geo-Location Services = ERROR

– Orbit deposits recorded. No signal was found.}

… ]

The report was short as Opal had trimmed much of its fat over the weeks to shorten the computation time by nearly half. As before, many of the weapons, and munitions the Omega had were not listed on the manifest. Opa, being a Warmind, understood that they had been trojan horses. Omega was supposed to be a civilian ship. A rather large one, but a civilian ship nonetheless.

The amount of military hardware she had found over the months astounded her. There were no doubts that it was a strategic move on Earth’s part to keep control over the colony should trouble arise from within. That aside, weapon caches she’d found during her reconstruction showed half of them had been stored haphazardly. A side question that arose during these unearthings: why had the areas around her core been left untouched (spotless even) during the time she was offline?

It was clear that time past had taken quite a toll on the ship itself.

The top portion of the ship had rusted away. Plant life had taken over it completely, making it near imperceptible from the clouds where the mountain ended and the ship began. She had to clear all of it and strip 100 ft off the top of the ship before she found good metal. And even then, it had to be reinforced. Now the roof of the ship was comparable to a large condensed airport that could take off two of the largest cargo planes side by side with room to spare. Not that was her intention, but the room was there. She couldn’t condense her footprint and thus took advantage of the space. She also had kicked around ideas of bringing the forest back to its rooftop, but in a managed way to get back that aerial camouflage.

Back to the manifest –

Earth had different names for a variety of robots that spanned almost 800 languages. Records showed that there had been over 8,000, but wars, imperialism, and other macro-factors had condensed it down. That said, there still were almost 10+ frame models on her ship. It got condensed down further into the following models:

Spiders: Her construction drones the size of medium-sized earth dogs. They had the capabilities to be combatants and the humans had a designation for these conversions, but now they were just Spider Drones.

Light Frames: Humanoid frames, or any frame humanoid robots under 10ft of height. Mainly combatant models, with several stripped-down construction models. At the moment, there was one lightframe in the R&D bay that was to be her personal use model.

Heavy Frames: Large robots that consisted of her Spider IFVs, her Spider APCs, two experimental Spider Tanks, and two experimental Bipedal Combat Offense units.

Aerial frames were a different beast altogether when Opal considered how many different models there were. Almost 30+ models. Since the flight bays were on the outer edges of the ship, a good portion did not survive the crash. Half of them were Space Self-Defense Drones. None of those survived. However, she would have recycled them regardless since… She wasn’t in space. The point was made.

Moving down the list, Human Vehicles were human vehicles. She could have them piloted remotely. But that then posed a problem with the lack of wireless infrastructure. At the current moment, she had been quietly installing towers in a ring around her; she was limited in the sense of advanced resources, things such as microchips, boards, and other components. Low, or dumb, level components were not compatible with her as it lacked the sophistication for her to pilot it.

This roadblock was removed with a less-than-favorable option such as installing on-board mid-grade Dumb AIs that would report to her, like the construction drones. Why was this not favorable? Because she already noted how the spiders seemed to be developing their egos. It was cute. She saw them as her children now at this point when she compared it to the Hikari. Putting that kind of developing AI into a heavily armored and weaponized chassis was NOT a good idea. It meant they could challenge her. Not in a way that mattered. She could take them down. The damage inflicted on her while she did so worried her. It handed too much control into a variable she was not ready to trust…

Thus, she would recycle human eccentric vehicles for materials and space. There were blueprints for AI-operated vehicles on the back burner to replace them. That would not come into play once she could find a dead-kill option that was a surefire option to protect herself. So, a couple of tanks would be spared from the Forge as backup options.

Life support systems were being recycled. In its place, a new vent system was being put in place to circulate the air. While not originally planned since viable air for living creatures was not needed, she took into consideration that Haiafe, Syfa, and her mate would walk her halls as well as a few other of the Hikari she trusted not to mess with her stuff.

Flight systems were being completely dismantled. As of this moment, Opal had no plans for their spaces. The bottom rear thruster had been dismantled and recycled. At the moment, she planned to turn it into a quick-deployment bay for ground forces.

The satellites she’d deployed in orbit before crashing did not respond to her hails, and thus, assumed they had either fallen out of orbit. Burning up on entry, or flying into the void of space. Either way, they were out of play for her. She was not sure if attempting to establish a new orbital network was wise at her current stage since expanding her ground network was on hold as well.

When the Omega entered this planet's atmosphere, she had entered over the continent. With three different options. One to land in a large land-locked sea to the west, crash on snowy plains to the east, or crash into the valley she had landed in. She didn’t have time to gauge the depth of that sea. The ship was created to withstand the vacuum and the pressures it brought. The ship could not withstand hitting the sea at the attack angles she had. Had she, there was a high likelihood of rolling and then sinking. Water covered the entire ship, and thus, it would be completely lost.

Crashing down on plains was a better option, but the rolling factor was high. It was a secondary option she could have used. It was by far more preferable than sinking into the nothingness of an ocean.

This valley, while not agreeable, offered protection against the tipping factor since the ship was taller than it was wider. It also had a lake on it that softened the blow, but she had also lost a good portion of her bulkhead hitting the top of a mountain. It worked as it allowed her to slam into the ocean, and then nearly roll. The ship positioned itself and slammed against the opposite mountain and then slid up the valley several hundred meters before it came to a stop.

Regardless of her choices, heavy damage was going to happen. She just picked an option that had an outcome she felt would be better. That also meant that luck had been on her side as well that day since the calculations had been on the fly.

Whether it worked out in the end was not her call, she could only roll the dice.. Opal was stuck here for the foreseeable future. Nothing she could do at the current moment would change that. No matter how many projections she made from the saved data – whether her decision to land here specifically was a good idea – or maybe if she’d banked a degree to the right – or left – or the endless amount of possibilities she could’ve thought up if she’d done one action in the long line of controllable factors led to her crashlanding…

“Opal…?” Syfa’s distant voice was heard.