RECOVERED LOGS: CHARACTERISTICS OF CORAL - 2

Coral naturally exists in one of four states.

First, 'Dead' Coral, which has ceased biological activity like any other organism, does not reproduce or mutate, and is useful only as a finite fuel source that is less potent than normal Coral, but still many times more energetic than any other known substance. Coral does not have a limited lifespan and is resistant to almost all environments, and so natural Dead Coral is a rarity that only arises due to special circumstances.

Second, 'Inert' Coral, which remains alive, but has formed into larger structures with other Coral organisms, forming biological growth structures. This state of Coral is the most stable, and also the one that earned Coral its name. Propagation rates of this state of Coral is slower than usual.

Third, 'Active' Coral, which is Coral that has not formed into structures. In this state, Coral is significantly more energetic, and displays the Convergence and Density traits most strongly.

Fourth, 'Surging' Coral, which is Coral that has been agitated until the point that it starts to release energy. This is by far the most dangerous state of Coral that isn't actively combusting, as such surges can create streams of Coral capable of evaporating mech-scale armour in short order. Inside of an enclosed environment, or near a sufficiently large concentration of Surging Coral, this can also create areas that will rapidly damage and corrode all known materials.

Surges are typically short lived, as the Coral is not prone to self-immolation. It is possible for a surge to end in combustion if the conditions are right. Burning Surging Coral results in energy releases that have more in common with detonations than they do with typical Coral burn patterns. Given typical concentrations of Surging Coral, this will usually result in geographical alterations.

Active Coral is most useful in generators or other systems that require continuous release of energy, but it is possible to manipulate Surging Coral for other purposes.

2.1

How does someone get through what is optimistically going to be at least fifteen kilometres of earth, rock, stone and ice, and realistically is looking more like twenty?

Well, it takes a lot of time and effort.

Fortunately, there were answers. One of those answers?

IA-02.

A C-Weapon they named the 'Ice Worm'.

It was probably one of the most absolutely ridiculous machines that had ever been built by the Rubicon Research Institute, and let me assure you, that was saying something.

Not the most ridiculous one they'd ever designed, no, but among the ones that had made it into actual production?

Ice Worm was at the top of the list.

As the name might imply, the Ice Worm was a gigantic, worm-shaped machine. It was kilometres long, covered in very thick armour and drills, equipped with drones, missiles, and a Area Coral Discharger that would zap everything within its vicinity. Completing the machine was double layer Coral Shield, which rendered it more or less immune to harm without a lot of effort.

What did the 'Ice' part of the name mean?

It was developed in the arctic.

That's it.

That's the whole reason.

Marketing had not been consulted that day. Literally, there'd been a flu going around, and by coincidence, everyone involved hadn't been.

Why bring it up?

The Ice Worm was a machine capable of burrowing- and burrowing rapidly, at that. It could punch through ice, earth, and metal extremely fast, enabling it to travel underneath the ground at surprisingly high speeds. Part of that was the drills, which were massive, fast, and could do that job pretty easily, but the rest of it?

It was the Coral Shields. While it was moving, those shields were going wild, tearing up everything they came into contact with. They were violently repulsive, the Coral manipulated into a semi-Surging barrier that would rip apart almost everything.

All this was to say, if you wanted to dig, the Ice Worm could do it.

Problem: I didn't have the Ice Worm. Only one of them had been built, and as it happened?

The PCA had found it and helped themselves to it.

Which, you know, meant I couldn't use it.

It was... somewhere above me at the moment. The Ice Worm defends Watchpoint Alpha, and I was below that place. Since it was a C-Weapon, that wasn't an insurmountable problem; if I waited long enough I'd probably get it within contact range eventually, and once that happened it wouldn't have taken too long to seize control of it.

Which was great, save for two little facts. First, that would take a while. Second, the PCA had helped themselves to it. If it started doing it wasn't meant to, the PCA would come running.

There was an additional problem in that the Ice Worm, being so ridiculously massive was also rather easily detected whenever it was on the move.

All of which meant that even if I did acquire it, I still couldn't use it.

That, in turn, meant that I was out of luck, right?

Wrong.

The Ice Worm itself might have been useless to me, but as mentioned, its design incorporated missiles and drones.

Fun facts about those?

Those could be deployed underground. They made use of most of the same technology that the Ice Worm itself did, just with less drills, and significantly miniaturised. The missiles had enough thrust behind them that their miniature Coral shields would last long enough to punch through most everything, while the drones had a smaller capacitor for a relatively short trip through the ice.

I didn't have everything I'd need to directly replicate them, but, honestly, that was fine. I didn't actually want a direct replication. The drones weren't that intelligent- and they weren't actually capable of unlimited autonomous operation, either. The missiles were expendable, one-use, and quite, quite explosive.

They were Coral missiles, after all.

So no, I didn't need them. I needed... something derived from them. Something a bit more subtle than the Ice Worm. Something that would let me deploy stuff to the surface without leaving a big, long tunnel leading right back down for them to exploit.

And hey, it wasn't like I was doing anything else, so why not?

I started with as close to a replication of the Ice Worm missile as I could manage, mostly just to make sure I could handle the whole 'design and build' process in the first place.

It was... pretty tricky, honestly. Not the designing portion, no, not with how much I'd gone through their education on engineering, not with how much I'd seen them in action to draw cues from.

The real problem was putting that to use in the first place. 'Modern day' (The beyond cutting edge now out of date by 25-ish years) CAD programs were stupid advanced, more than capable of simulating real world factors with ease.

Included, however, were 'ease of use'... features.

I say it like that because while they would have been spectacularly useful to Humans, they were less than helpful to me.

Noise filtering? Constantly interfering with the inputs I was trying to make into the programs.

Automatic suggestions and corrections? Did you mean 'Fuck your attempts to have a command run properly?'?

The modern day equivalent of anti-mouse jiggle, because mice were barely a thing anymore for some god-forsaken reason? Oh, you better believe that was messing me up.

I had noticed in the past that most AIs turned these things off before using these systems, and after the first five minutes, I'd figured out why.

They had it easier than I did, though. They were native digital entities, created with all the tools they'd need to interact with that side of things. The shit I was doing was hacked together in comparison. None of this stuff was designed with Coral Consciousnesses in mind.

Turning off the assists was ultimately done easiest by having a maintenance drone come in and manually do it by controlling a peripheral, which was such a ridiculous workaround that I resolved to myself to redo as much of this shit for me as soon as possible.

With that out of the way, though?

It actually worked out pretty well the first time around. The missile even flew for a little bit when I tested it out. It had crashed straight into a building, knocking it right over, but that was to be expected since it had absolutely no telemetry or control nodes synced to it. I'd turned it on and it had gone forwards.

An incredible start.

From there, I went to the drone. That, too, worked out pretty well the first time around, although there were a few components that I just didn't have the setup to fabricate yet. The drone floated for a bit, went in circles a few times, and then eventually ran out of energy once the capacitor was depleted and it had to operate on nothing but the miniscule regeneration of the utterly tiny amount of Coral inside of it. It was honestly faster to just let it sit and recharge, at that point.

But it worked, and it worked better than the missile had, since it had native Coral control systems, and that was the important part.

All of that proved that I did, in fact, have the ability to achieve what I wanted to do.

Next step; actually doing it.

What followed was about four months of iterative designs, kitbashing, clever solutions, and sheer, boneheaded stubbornness.

The end result? It was...

It was a worm.

It was a worm with a drill at the front.

Four sections long, with the first section being the main and primary drill that incorporated some of the same drilling tech that let the Ice Worm travel through things, just significantly less... violent. Slower, but also significantly less noticeable. The second section was the support for the rest of the worm; the main generator, the capacitors, the power feeds, the control systems, all the important stuff. Also attached was a detonator, just in case it was in danger of capture and I wanted to deny more specific information about it. Given that most of these internals were based on Coral, it would likely do the job.

Technically, with just those two sections, I'd actually achieved what I wanted. It could have theoretically gotten itself to the surface just with that.

It just wouldn't have been very useful with just that. The third and fourth sections came in there.

The third section was a series of packed up equipment that contained, with a single exception, what the Colonial Administration referred to as 'emergency industry package', basically everything you'd need to work your way to standard modern industry if absolutely everything else was broken. The sole exception?

Power generation.

Because Coral.

The fourth and final section was the garage, which contained two standard mech bays good for servicing two mechs of AC size or smaller, or one mech the size of a Heavy MT. I had packed it wall to wall and floor to ceiling with ten MTs and sixty maintenance drones. The back of it opened up and they would come spilling out like a clown car of warmachines, but that was the absolute minimum of a construction crew according to the Colonial Administration.

Armored Core 6 was a setting where colony ships more closely resembled flying cities, just to note.

The entire thing was covered with just enough shielding to not die if something looked at it funny, and... that was just about it, honestly.

I affectionately referred to it as the 'drillship', and was pleasantly surprised when it didn't violently explode after I put it through its paces in testing. I was even more surprised when it worked as I intended it to. Sure, it wasn't going to do any pure vertical climbs, but that wasn't that big of a dealbreaker. Popping up right next to Watchpoint Alpha would have been... less than ideal.

Still, I had a way out now. As for what I was going to do when I was up there... Well, I'll figure that out when I get there.

At the very least, it promised to be interesting.