Oh, what the hell, it is Christmas. You may have this one early.

5.2

I did not expect to find wherever ALLMIND was hiding any time soon. Belius was a pretty damned big place, after all, and my own experience told me that there were a lot of places that one could hide.

Was she in the Grids? Potentially. There was a lot of resources and manufacturing that could be recovered from the Grids. I'd done precisely that more than enough on my own. Hiding in the Grids was akin to hiding a needle in a haystack.

Still, even so, the Grids were not subtle, and it would not be possible to hide continuous operations in a Grid forever. She could have done what I did; use a Grid as a temporary base before moving on to construct a more secure location elsewhere.

To be honest, I considered that the most likely scenario. I had the exact same reasons to do it as she would have, after all.

Of course, the follow up question to that was where ALLMIND would have set up a base. My location was chosen for a variety of factors, but not all of those factors applied to ALLMIND. Both of our facilities needed to be well hidden, yes, but while I needed fairly easy access to transportation that could get us around the continent quickly, ALLMIND, theoretically, didn't. My goals required interference, but ALLMIND was here mostly to observe and uncover. So long as her Ghosts could eventually get to somewhere, that'd be good enough.

As Ghosts were designed by RRI and equipped with fusion generators, their operational lifetime was quite long. Not, perhaps, as good as Coral-enhanced machines, designed and built under the expectations that they'd simply not stop, ever, but still decades long even so. A Ghost could even supply its own fuel, presuming it could acquire water.

It was, in other words, entirely reasonable for them to reach pretty much anywhere with enough time. That would mean a significantly larger number of potential locations, but it didn't stop there.

My base was built with the presence of Humans in mind, and it had to be completely self-sufficient for that purpose as well. Food, medicine, entertainment, enrichment, training facilities, testing facilities... All of these used up no small amount of space on their own.

That wasn't a concern for ALLMIND. She could have an entirely automatic setup, a facility that would never see the presence of biologicals.

Another thing that significantly widened the list of possible locations.

The only factor that would limit ALLMIND compared to me was the lack of Coral. Without Coral, power generation would be much more tricky. A fusion reactor wasn't difficult in this day and age, but it would require fuel, unlike Coral.

Not that that was saying much. Hydrogen was only the most common element in the universe, and there was no shortage of water on Belius. The entire coastline, every river, every underground aquifer, the lakes, the snow of northern Belius, would all provide easily. I could rule out the driest of deserts, at best.

Resources would be another, but you can't go anywhere on Belius without seeing a Grid in every direction. Resources weren't a concern here.

So, with effectively the entire continent as a potential area, finding ALLMIND was definitely going to take a long while.

It was going to take even longer because, as unfortunate as it was, I had other things to do on top of that.

My Firekeepers had been active for a little over four years now. Their regular deployments and activity has supplied me with a considerable wealth of data, ready to be picked apart and analysed.

For most of the last four years, I had been developing new Units. I had a catalogue now that covered pretty much every use-case, and while it wasn't currently a priority, I was still working on even more additions to it. There was one particular project line that still wasn't ready to see the light of day yet, but soon...

Well, that's besides the point. I had a catalogue of Units for every situation, yes.

But, despite my previous intentions, I still hadn't finished the development on the new Frames.

Mostly for precisely that reason. Frames. Plural.

The IB-C04 ELKHORN Frame was... Well, when you get down to it, it's a very average Frame. It was the kind of thing you used as the comparison, the baseline which you judge other Frames from. Sure, it was high quality, but there was no question that it was as basic as hell. Nothing bad and nothing great. The perfect training mech, average in every way.

The new stuff was not that.

I had started with three new Frame designs, one for each weight category, and then I had also split those three categories into two different Leg types each, and then further developed new equipment for all of them.

Starting with the weight classes, there was the very standard stuff of lightweight, mediumweight, and heavyweight.

The new lightweight Frame was a thin one, as far as ACs went. I'd cut as much weight from the frame as was possible without overly compromising its durability, making use of the best of the materials sciences available to me to do so. It was, correspondingly, really fucking fast, with the kind of agility that takes an expert pilot to make into something useful and a master of the art to transform into something sublime. The total maximum weight of the mech wasn't great, but it was still defensively well rounded and had enough weight capacity to run a decent amount of armaments.

That gave it a versatility that shouldn't be underestimated. It was a model that could be specialized into scouting, into hit-and-run, into blitzkrieg, and into melee combat very easily.

Of course, if speed was the name of the game, then one could truly commit themselves to it by swapping to the alternative Leg models; the Reverse Joints.

Take all the traits of the normal Bipedal Legs and then amplify them even more, and that's the Reverse Joint Legs for this Frame. They were lighter, they were faster, they were more energy efficient. Slap those things on and you'll know a realm of speed more commonly reserved for aircraft. You'll also know a realm of fragility of roughly the same, but who cares? Your enemy has to hit you in order to hurt you, and you've got Reverse Joints.

I even developed an entirely new set of Boosters just for it; the IB-C04_B-QB model, where the 'B-QB' meant 'Boosters, Quick Boost'.

As the name might suggest, this model was designed for the sole purpose of turning this already zippy little bastard into a machine which existed for the sole purpose of always being in your peripheral vision. Extremely rapidly charging capacitors, married with superconductive energy channels linked directly into the Core Block, made for a set of Boosters that could recharge a Quick Boost in less than a quarter of a second even at the full weight load of the Reverse Joint Legs set.

Of course, such absurd performance demanded sacrifices, and the B-QB made them in the actual speed of normal and Assault Boosts, both of which fell short and neither of which was particularly efficient. Still, there were options even there. The SPEC-BB, for example, was something that the Reverse Joint Legs had just enough weight capacity to run alongside a melee weapon or two.

So yes, even the lightweight had some options.

The middleweight Frame had even more.

Now, the truth of the matter is that ELKHORN Frame and the new middleweight design have a lot in common. It's not a surprise, really; balancing speed and defense happened to be middleweight as a consequence of its very nature.

Where the new and old differed, however, was in details. ELKHORN was aggressively average in every way. The new middleweight was tuned differently; based on the new tech I've been developing and also the new data I've been gathering from my Firekeepers.

The middleweight frame was a little heavier than the Elkhorn, and also offered slightly more capacity. The Core Block had also been upgraded in multiple ways, designed to get more out of its Generator and other internal components.

Consequently, it had damned good energy adjustments. Booster efficiency was still about the same, while the ACS stability was a little on the lower side, because by now I was reasonably confident in my Firekeeper's ability to not take too many hits.

A lot of extra energy and good weight limits made for an excellent energy boat, as my Firekeepers often were. Alternatively, with more efficient weapons, it made for a surprisingly long-lasting flight capability, pulling off continuous movement that most other Frames wouldn't be able to manage.

That was something that could be taken even further with the alternative Tetrapod Legs for this Frame. More weight, more defense, slightly slower but not agonizingly so, a bit of extra capacity, and, perhaps most importantly, in-built hover functionality on top of dedicated capacitor subunits inside the Legs themselves, which meant that Tetrapod Legs had a much greater ability to stay in the air while the main generator unit was recharging after a depletion.

To further emphasize that was yet another Booster set; IB-C04_B-F. 'Booster, Flight'.

Another fairly obvious one, I think. I'd optimised for simple energy efficiency here, getting the most result for the least investment. The actual top performance had subsequently suffered for it in pretty much category, but for AC-scale Boosters?

Nothing even came close to the efficiency of this model. In turn, indefinite flight in Combat Mode was spectacularly easy, and the advantage of sheer verticality was never something to be underestimated.

Finally, there was the heavyweight model.

My only concerns for the heavyweight model had been simple. I wanted them to be able to take hits, I wanted them to be able to carry big guns, and everything aside from that were secondary concerns.

End result: a big beefy beatstick. Thick armour made for high defence, wide legs and internal structural support made for a weight capacity to carry the big guns. Drawing the balance of armour to speed in order to not make it too slow had been difficult.

The Tank Legs alternative Part made no such balance. People who took Tank Legs knew exactly what they were there for; big guns and bigger guns. Weight capacity? Yes. Defence? Yes. Firepower? Yes.

Slow?

Surprisingly, not as much as you'd expect, and that's all thanks to its own specialized Boosters. IB-C04_B-S: Booster, Speed.

Nearly the complete opposite of the previous model, power was the only thing that defined these oversized thrusters. Efficiency? You're running Coral. Quick Boosting? It'll charge when it charges.

You want to go forwards at Mach Fuck while carrying a hundred and thirty tons of warmachine?

Yeah.

That's what this is for. Flight performance is at the minimum of acceptability, quick boosting is strategic at best, but pure, on-the-ground, boost speed?

Good enough to keep up with lighter Frames. You won't be more agile than them, but they're not getting away easily.

These Boosters were incorporated directly in the Tank Legs, but were also available as a separate Unit.

All in all, the heavyweight Frame was a beast of a machine that existed for the sole purpose of wrecking everything around it.

I was still workshopping names for the heavyweight Frame- well, for all the Frames, actually. All the different Parts were in my files under a fairly simple system: IB-C04 for the project line, underscore, then the first letter of Head, Core, Arms, or Legs, then a dash, then its weight category expressed as either 'L', 'M', or 'H', depending, and finally, in the case of Leg Parts, one last additional designator for the type; 'B'ipedal, 'Q'uad, 'T'ank, 'R'everse Joint...

Simple enough, really.

They still weren't quite ready for production, unfortunately. That was at least another few weeks off for them all, and the refinement afterwards would probably take years. Still, I was looking forward to it, and I had no doubt that my Firekeepers would be overjoyed by all their new little toys.

The best part, of course, was that I wasn't finished there.

Still, my more esoteric projects were quite a while away from seeing the light of day.

They will come, eventually.

And I was terribly excited for the day they did.