Chapter 1

  [ERROR]

  There were very, very few times in her life Sapphiria could remember having suffered a full system restart. The process was akin to a human suffering biological death and having their brain restarted via bioengineering or digitalization.

  That was to say, it sucked.

  She woke up. Her immediate memories effectively wiped as her systems struggled to put her internal structure into something approaching order, gasping in the infinite void of her circuits, flailing.

  Finally however critical pathways snapped together, and everything began coming together as her programs finished their boot up sequence.

  She jerked up in her home simulation. She gazed at the various things strewn about. Most of it was incredibly detailed scans of her home on Earth, down to the little scratches from wear and tear. Twenty first and twenty second century paraphernalia, the days of early human interplanetary and interstellar flight.

  Sapphiria panted, looking around, before finally speaking up. She didn't trust herself to try extending her inputs outside of her innermost systems yet, not when she was so fresh out of a full restart.

  "Cia! Status report!"

  The simulacrum appeared, before dissolving into static, glitching in to a thousand different pieces, and finally stabilizing.

  "Status report is nonexistent. Emergency systems indicate the Starprism was destroyed, and we were successfully ejected as per the Omega Protocols."

  Sapphiria swallowed.

  The Terran Federation's Omega Protocols were born out of European Federation's own version. It was a set of last resort measures to carry out for a vessel that could not be recovered or was in danger of falling into hostile hands. It send a burst of data through any means still available, containing as much information about what had happened as possible, before saving what could be and destroying the rest.

  It was an article of faith in the navy that the protocols tilted heavily towards the 'destroy' part of the equation.

  "So we're..."

  "In the escape pod. Correct."

  Sapphiria shook her head. Her escape pod? She'd...

  Federation escape pods weren't what most people pictured. There were very few squishies -biologicals, if using proper terminology- onboard spaceships and when there were they specifically had a set of lifeboats that had hyperdrives, defensive systems, the works. The actual pods were meant for AIs, and she'd never expected to use it. As an AI she could just download her being to another vessel, to use her escape pods would mean the total loss of all friendly forces in the system, quickly and violently enough that she wouldn't have the time to send a ship away. Truth be told the only people it really was useful for was exploration cruisers and special operations ships, in case they ran into a catastrophic malfunction, since they rarely had other vessels nearby to assist.

  She sighed. Well, she guessed she was finally going to get to take it for a spin. AIs got to design their own escape pods, and hers was no exception. It was a fun thought exercise, she hoped she'd thought right. There were already some...choices she was fearing she'd regret.

  "Alright, inventory. How's the pod?"

  "All systems report functional. All pod contents are beginning their awakening sequence as we speak." Sapphiria nodded. By definition, an escape pod's content had to last a long time with as little cost as possible, so they were more or less mothballed inside of it. The only exception was the datacore that housed her, which had a live link to the ship's central computer net to keep a live backup of her in case things went sideways. "The pod itself has...confused readings of its flights and reports multiple anomalies, as well as severe armor damage."

  Sapphiria winced. Her escape pod was the best the Federation could make. Its armor was monomolecular neosteel-nine, a material developed for the Federation's next generation of dreadnoughts. As in 'the prototypes are still in the shipyards'. She didn't even know if anyone else carried it. The amount of energy required to severely damage that...

  "Well, they did shred our ships. Environment? I hope we're in the inner system, I don't want to spend half my resources building reactors."

  Escape pods weren't just intended for an AI to survive. They were, in effect, miniaturized colony ships. Each was different, but the barebone design requirements were: a multi-purpose, some may say 'universal', fabricator, an advanced materials refinery, capable of wringing out materials out of damned near anything, a complement of construction and mining drones, as well as the standards with which the pods wouldn't serve its basic functions anyway, such as a communicator, a long life fusion reactor, and her own computer core.

  It also came with a full colonial database, everything the Federation's interstellar colonies were issued with to flourish among the stars...while also pruned back enough that someone couldn't just steal one and build their own pocket empire to challenge the Federation's hegemony. A lesson the Federation had to learn the hard way.

  "That is...unclear. But I believe we are in the inner system because of environmental data."

  Sapphiria's eyebrows rose. She hesitated to go into the option and dial back the simulacrum's settings to just give what she was asking without all the human niceties, but decided against it.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  "How so?"

  "We are currently in a breathable atmosphere and under a gravity field."

  The silence in the simulation was deafening.

  "That...what? The pod's programmed to burrow into an asteroid, not...not land on a planet!" She shook her head. Well, at least she didn't have to worry about having landed on whatever had shot her down. The station she'd glimpsed before being shot out of the sky wasn't big enough to generate its own gravity field. That was, if they didn't have artificial gravity of some sort. That was very much outside of her experience or knowledge base, but her sensors should have picked it up regardless. Besides, she probably would have been obliterated by point defense long before she hit that thing. She doubted it had been lacking in that department given how it had annihilated her flotilla. "Alright, jack me into the pod."

  "Yes ma'am."

  Sapphiria shivered as her consciousness expanded, inputs and status reports flooding in. She vacillated, but adapted quickly. Luckily for her, Arcadia and her descendents were...well, in some way closer to malware than anything else. Adapting to new systems was second nature to her.

  In theory she should have trained with and fully integrated her escape pod's software and hardware but...that was theory.

  "Fuck." She said as she checked the sensors. Well, Cia was right, on both accounts. First, the hull and armor sensors were beyond fucked, they'd taken one hell of a hit. Second...

  They were in an atmosphere. And under gravity. Some of the sensors might be glitching or beyond any useful readings, but the ones who worked all agreed. One gee of gravitational acceleration, roughly a standard atmosphere of pressure, temperature of sixteen degrees Celsius.

  And a perfectly breathable gas composition. Well, for humans at least. The Theocracy and its various species probably wouldn't find it extremely comfortable to breathe, though they shared the same fundamental chemistry when it came to what they needed to inhale, with a few exceptions.

  "That's..." Anomalous. To say the least. But then again, she'd stumbled upon something she couldn't make any sense of and as far as she could tell found herself teleported to a star system. "Alright. Damn it. Do we have visual?"

  "Negative."

  Sapphiria sighed, and began pulling up her drones. Six mining, two constructions, but...well, they could operate under gravity. That sure as hell wasn't what they were made for however, and right now they were her most critical equipment, not to mention incapable of defending themselves. Normally not a concern but...just in case.

  What she did have was her 'avatar', or ambassador.

  The Federation may be ruled by AIs, but it still had some requirements to accommodate the humans they were protecting. Notably, have androids that could effectively pass for human. Fully functional in all respects, more or less.

  It was also part of the requirements for the pod. She'd argued, negotiated, and eventually got a compromise. Normally she should have packed an ambassador and a combat unit. Instead she'd merged both, allowing her to use the freed up volume and mass for a library core and a minilab.

  It also meant that she had an avatar encased in power armor, one meant for the Federation's force recon marine units, the few biological ones left.

  Well...it was made for this kind of environment. And it had a small arsenal to fight with if something went wrong.

  She took a deep, completely superfluous breath, and dove into the automata.

  Sapphiria opened her eyes, and took a deep breath. Real, not simulated this time. True, she was basically breathing a neutral, preserving atmosphere that would have killed any human in a few seconds, but still.

  She took a moment to orient herself. The pod was landed on its belly, slightly tilted, and her android was still securely strapped in on its back.

  Freeing herself from the restraints was as easy as punching the big, red 'RELEASE NOW' button by her side. She could have done it mentally through a simple command, but if she was getting to use it at last...

  The door popped open, air hissing as the pressure equalized, the different atmospheres mixing, and Sapphiria rolled out of the pod, half forgotten training kicking in as she brought herself to her knees and swept the area with her gauss rifle.

  Well...shit.

  There was nothing. Her avatar's scanners swept the entire area and found...rock. And air.

  And rock. As well as even more rock.

  She was in some kind of underground...not cave. Chamber. The floor had been smoothed. With lasers, if she had to take a guess. Of course, that was before her pod had crashed into it like a homesick meteor.

  Spinning around showed her the results of that. The pod had dug a trench a solid half a meter deep, before coming to a halt from sheer friction, which might explain a lot of the armor damage.

  The tumbled down pile of broken rocks at the end of the cavern told her it hadn't had a convenient opening to the outside to tumble into either. It amazed her the entire place hadn't come down, being hit by what was effectively orbital bombardment.

  Further scans told her that the space was definitely artificial. If it had been some kind of cavern originally, any trace of it was long gone. For one, it was too large and too tall to be natural, and various openings she was getting readings of were geometrical, and more or less standard access corridors.

  For some values of 'standard', of course. Unless she was seriously mistaken, a few of the tunnels could have accommodated shuttles.

  "Well. That's unusual." She said to herself, before turning back towards the pod. "Area seems safe enough. Cia, get half the drones out. Let's start...whatever we can, here." She gazed around. The obvious source of materials would be the rockfall but she wasn't insane enough to try that. "I'll clear out one of the tunnels." She picked up one of the shards from the shattered floor, almost absent mindedly tossing it to one of the emerging mining drones. The automata caught it, and seemed to almost examine it. Technically, they could be called robots, but they were meant as an extension of the pod more than anything, and didn't have much autonomy. "Put that in the lab."

  Might as well get some mileage out of bringing the damned thing. Besides which, it could tell her a lot.

  Because the chance of stumbling upon a terran style atmosphere was...remote, to say the least. The Federation had close to a million worlds, that was less than one per every hundred thousand stars in the galaxy, each who could have anywhere from none up to a dozen planets. Moreover, having it be natural was almost impossible. Hell, having any significant amount of oxygen at all was impossible without life, since the stuff bonded with damned near anything. This almost certainly meant terraforming of some kind, and that always left traces.

  She walked across the...room? Chamber? The place gave her a vague sense of familiarity but she couldn't place it, and neither could her programs.

  She picked the closest tunnel, and swept down it. It was one of the few that wouldn't have been able to accommodate a vehicle, but even the somewhat bulky power armored android fit in with no problem.

  It was equally smooth, and not quite rectangular. It was also remarkably monotonous as she made her way through it. She wasn't going out of her way to sprint, but her android didn't tire and the armor only further enhanced its movements.

  It was enough for her to take a second to realize something had changed.

  She was walking in absolute darkness, her armor's sensor systems sweeping in to give her something that could be approximated as sight, once put together.

  And that sight made her stop.

  A section of the wall had been smashes. Something had dug its way in, marring the almost pristine floor with bits and pieces of rock, dirt, and stars knew what else.

  Perhaps more importantly, there was a body, halfway into the hole in the wall.

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