Rubicon's communication infrastructure was, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly fucked up.

Before the Fires, the planetary communication network had been an extremely well developed thing, stretching across every single part of the planet without exception. Part of that had been land based installations, like this building, part of that had been a satellite network, part of that had been the Grids, and the last part of that had been a variety of ocean-based equipment. There had been absolutely nowhere you could go on Rubicon's surface that didn't have a network signal somehow.

No longer.

The Grids were still there, for the most part. A decent amount of the ground based facilities were still active. A couple of the ocean facilities were still around. The satellite network was wholly, completely gone.

There were plenty of records, lots of data, that gave me a rather detailed picture of the hows and whys.

The network had taken its first hit from the Fires of Ibis, of course. A lot of the actual, physical infrastructure behind the network had been destroyed by them. But, not all.

It had been a confusing, dangerous time, then. Most of Institute City, by far the largest population centre, was dead outright, but the rest of the planet, especially the places shielded by the sheer bulk of the Grids? They were still around. Industrial workers, mostly, and whatever family they had with them.

The Grids hadn't been bad places to live, by any means. Just... well, they were industrial facilities first. Entertainment hadn't been the hugest of things, out there. Not much in the way of parks or nature. Plenty of electronic and VR entertainment, at least.

And then had come the Fires, and with it, the almost complete obliteration of that side of things.

Food had become scarce, because most of the food production went up in flames. Entertainment was barely a thing, because most of the servers were uncontactable between either the destruction of the servers or the interference of the Fires. Society had collapsed in fairly short order. There had been plenty of space and industrial resources, though.

As one may expect when there was a surplus of metal and a deficit of food, things had quickly gone even further south from there. Gangs, protection rackets, bandits... all that came out quickly.

Some might say 'just start farming'. Those people don't realize how difficult it is to start a farm without seeds on a planet with a very low amount of fertile soil. There's a reason that Rubicon was an industrial planet. Most of the biosphere here was artificial.

In any case, with all these factions and whatnot springing up all over Rubicon, what was left of the planetary communication network had quickly been divided even further. Things had been switched off the global lines, and left for local use lest a prospective enemy happen to use it against them. There wasn't a single network anymore; there were hundreds, thousands, of smaller ones.

It was still possible to send a message across the world. There was just no way to do it without routing it through at least one unsecure sector. At that point, you were encrypting your messages and hoping for the best.

All of that had lasted about a year and a half, before the Fires of Ibis had... mostly been spent in terms of world-melting power, and the planet-covering flames had started coalescing into multiple storms. In turn, that made it mostly safe to enter the Rubicon system again.

At that point?

The PCA had swept in.

The satellite network had still existed in some small capacity, before the PCA had shown up. They had very quickly 'fixed' that, either seizing or destroying the remaining satellites to cut Rubicon off from the outside. They'd landed, and set up numerous Watchpoints all over the place, all for the sake of keeping an eye on the planet. They'd laid down the law on Rubicon, but the problem with that?

Their law was 'The Planet Is Closed'.

There had been, as far as I could tell, three larger polities that had risen from the mess that Rubicon had turned into.

The PCA hadn't cared. Subject Guard and the Enforcement Squads had been sent, and all three had burned to the ground. There had been no negotiation. The AI Enforcement System which directed the PCA did not afford any respect or care to things like 'Human Rights' or 'Compromising'. It had a job to do. It did it.

The Enforcement System did seem to have some awareness of ethics. That's why it had cut the planet off first. Even among the greater galactic community, the shit it was doing wasn't exactly... popular.

So yeah. Fuck the PCA.

The PCA had been all 'boots on the ground' all over the planet while it was setting up the rest of the enforcement measures, the key points being the orbital facilities surrounding Rubicon. Once those were in place, the PCA had pulled back for the most part ever since, at least. All the actions it still engaged in were lower level stuff, mostly just maintaining the current status quo since it benefited them.

I knew most of that because the Rubicon Liberation Front had declared itself formally a few years back. Dolmayan was active, alongside Flatwell, and both of them were a constant thorn in the side of the PCA and other surviving groups on this planet. For the PCA, that was because they made a point of constantly, repeatedly poking them, broadcasting the results of PCA 'enforcement actions' around the world. They furthermore sheltered civilians, and often took out the worst of the Doser and other bandit factions more concerned with their own joys than with the lives of people they were fucking over.

There was a long, long, history of these broadcasts inside the memory banks of the station. Could it have been a lie? Quite possibly, but rather unlikely, I felt. All of it was self-consistent, if also trending towards a slowly growing... nearly religious bent in the speeches they attached to them. Concerning, but not surprising given the circumstances.

I could at least confirm that a decent chunk of it had happened exactly as the RLF's data showed. More than a few corroborating reports from the PCA's side of things had also ended up routed through this station, and had then been stored. When your enemy really is that horrible, why even bother lying?

The RLF's laundry might not have been pure white, but compared to the likes of the Dosers and PCA? It may as well have been.

I... If I wanted to actually have a real effect on the future, then I needed to get over there. Preferably sooner rather than later.

Aside from that, one new thing I did find out was the continued survival of Coral was at least partially known to the public. The PCA's official stance on the matter proclaimed that the vast majority of Coral had been destroyed (Not a lie, exactly.), and that the situation was being monitored (Also not a lie, exactly.). Not much more than that, but enough to ensure a semi-regular supply of greedy fools would make attempts at arriving on Rubicon to mine up the Coral. That was hilariously illegal, of course. Even if they did make it through the web of orbital weapons, they'd have to go through the Dosers and the RLF.

Not a great idea, that. Neither may have been particularly well armed compared to the PCA, but they were still quite dangerous, and quite, quite unwilling to allow others access to the Coral.

...

Still, there wasn't a whole lot I could do about all of that at the moment. All of that stuff was happening at the other side of the Alean ocean, in Belius. If I could get there...

Ugh. It actually put me in kind of a bind. Most of these ice fields were dull, boring. Doing things here would have gotten attention. There was a distinct lack of resources around here that was much more readily available over there.

But... This was a problem that ultimately wasn't impossible to solve, though.

Thanks to the information I'd discovered, I'd found that there were several spots throughout the ice fields that were suffering continuous interference from the remnants of the Fires of Ibis. Those spots? They couldn't be monitored from space like the rest of the fields.

More than a few of those spots had been utilised by the PCA for its own purposes. I knew that much because the PCA had piggybacked off of these communication stations while they were still setting up the orbital network.

Critically, however, not all of them had been. None were close, but if I could get to one, I'd be able to set up shop and not worry too much about the PCA falling from the sky to come check it out. If I could get that going? I probably would be able to make some modifications to the drillship that would let it cross the ocean. It was already watertight and good to handle pressure at pretty significant depths, but...

Well, it had no way to stop sinking, and no way to easily propel itself in water.

That, however, was getting ahead of myself.

There were actually two problems I was facing, here. Yes, the big one was crossing the ocean, but there was an additional, secondary problem that also had to be dealt with.

Maintaining contact.

The Coral synchronisation / Contact phenomenon had a pretty generous distance attached to it. I wasn't worried about operating the drillship anywhere in the icefields, that was well within range of Institute City.

Problem was, all that stuff? As noted, it's on the other side of the ocean. Literally on a different continent completely. The space magic bullshit of Coral was not that generous.

Not right now, at least.

Solving that problem in theory was quite simple. Just get more Coral. Solving that problem in practice, though? That was a two-sided thing, and only one side was easy.

The Coral mass in Institute City would grow over time entirely on its own. I could further speed that up by getting myself a vacuum chamber and putting as much Coral in there as possible. That actually wasn't that difficult since the Vascular Plant had a big one that only needed a little bit of repairs to get back in working order.

The other side, however, was the drillship. There was a pretty decent supply of Coral in there already, but unless I wanted to wait years for the Institute City supply to grow, then I was going to need more. I could fab up the stuff I'd need to store it just fine. I still had some space left over in the power section of the drillship.

But, of course, there wasn't exactly a lot of Coral to go around. The RLF had a few Wells that served as their lifelines, the Dosers could at least get enough to get high on the regular, mostly by stealing it from the RLF or plundering veins past the point of recovery, but aside from that?

The PCA had built Watchpoints on, near, and around every single other possible deposit.

I could handily cross the RLF and Doser supplies off the list, since they were on the other continent and that was the problem in the first place. I could also cross off most of the PCA Watchpoints too, since for the most part they were also on Belius.

All of that would have consigned me to a long wait -again- if not for one single little fact that I only knew about because I'd played the game. A PCA Watchpoint that, in the game, hadn't been operational. A Watchpoint that might have been decommissioned by now.

Maybe, just maybe, there was in fact some hope for me after all.

Engebret Tunnel.