Remnant - VI

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Requested By : Gib

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The waters of Menagerie were crystal clear, bare of all but the faintest pollution, and thanks to that he could see miles out into the greater ocean once he submerged. Bright fish ducked through and around just as bright coral formations and natural, rolling hills of settled sand and mud. He also observed no less than nine predatory species, six of which were sharks, two of which were brightly colored snakes, and one of which was a sort of stilt-legged crab that would settle in the nooks and crannies of coral and then rock up on its long legs to surprise unwary fish above it, which it would then neatly behead before it could struggle.

A fascinating creature.

Shockwave turned away from the creatures to finish cutting away the section of outer-armor he was working on and then turned, wrenching the section of plating free with his hand as he did. It came away with walls that crumbled and sank, sparking cables sputtering their last dregs of power into the salty void, and sturdy but nonetheless ruined supports. Then the Cybetronian stepped back and watched the bodies float up and away, towards the surface and out to sea.

When none moved after eighty seconds, he turned and knelt to sort through the sections of armor.

Much of it was base, primitive steel, as he had expected - but with a surprising purity. He raised a section to scan it more deeply and hummed, "Their alloying is rudimentary, but advanced, for the common technological base."

Or at least, the ones he had observed in the brief…

It wasn't right to call it a 'battle', but he did not wish to call it a 'slaughter' either - that would upset Ghira too much. Eventually he settled on 'an example' and returned the sample he was examining to the pile. As Shockwave turned, he looked along the ship's length and hummed thoughtfully, the sound trailing out across the water like sonar - he even registered its reflections and refractions for mapping reference.

As his gaze trailed along the hull, his scans detected an anomaly.

A pressurized environment…

Thudding through the water he knelt and reached into the ship to draw the storage container out and scanned it in depth - it was approximately the size of an average armored vehicle, by human standards. On the sides were emblazoned the serial codes 'K-100-R-675'. He did not understand the designation, but filed it away regardless - who knew what he could extract, should he find a handful of functioning Scrolls or computers aboard the sunken ship?

Regardless, he scanned it more in depth - and found two dozen relatively small, humanoid machines, folded into resting positions with their heads between their knees.

Droids?

Interesting…

He stacked it on top of the layers of armor-sections and rose, holding it over his head easily and turning to march for Menagerie's docks.

He had work to do.

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Ironwood woke to the gentle humming of an air-unit in the window beside his bed, and the dull beep of a doctor's scanner as it ran over his mangled side. He took a breath, and felt his body scream for it, hacking and heaving as the doctor turned, wide-eyed, to press a hand on his chest. He snapped his fingers and a nurse appeared, pressing a syringe into his neck that left his head foggy.

But less full of fire than it had been.

So he'd take what he could get.

"General Ironwood, you must be careful." The doctor, an older man with wispy, scant gray hair scattered around a bald crown, cautioned him. He laid a wiry hand on the side of Ironwood's head and smiled sadly, "You're in Mistral now. I flew down as quickly as I could."

"M-Mistral…"

"Mhm." The doctor nodded and pushed his glasses up his nose, then asked, "What is the last thing you remember?"

"Menagerie." He Grunted, "We were coming into range…"

"For your raid, yes." The doctor nodded, smiling reassuringly and gestured for him to go on.

"There was… A light…" He'd seen it from the window outside his quarters, at the fore of his flagship A bright, starling light caving out across the water like the wrath of some fell god reaching out to smite his fleet.

"Menagerie does have a new weapon, of some sort, then." The doctor sighed in a dissatisfied way, but shrugged the matter off a moment later.

"Doctor, t-tell me." He coughed suddenly, fire crawling up and down his throat from teeth to stomach. When it subsided finally, he choked out, "My crew- L-Lieutenant Copper- What happened to them?"

"Most of your crew survived to limp back to Mistral." The doctor reported quietly before he sighed, frowned, and went on, "As for your aid… Well, you and she were both caught in the blast. You survived, at least mostly, but she… Did not."

He had expected as much, resigned himself to it. But…

"What did you mean," he rasped, "by me 'mostly' surviving?"

"Ah, that's, well…" The doctor smiled apologetically, laid a hand on his chest and patted it gently. "Rest assured, Atlas' best prosthetic specialists are already on their way, General. And if all goes well, you'll set a new world record for the most extensive prosthetisization to date! So, ah, there's that?"

Ironwood blinked, and then heard his heart monitor scream an alert as blood roared through his ears.

"Yes, that's what I was afraid of." The doctor sighed, "Nurse, tranquilize him, if you would."

He saw a woman slip around and felt something cold slither into his arm through his IV, and after a moment, felt very drowsy all of the sudden. His panic abated as sleep dragged him down, and as much as he hated it, hated to be controlled by mere chemicals…

But by the Gods, was he tired.

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He felt the warm sun heat his plates as he emerged from the briny ocean, water sloughing off the stacked sections of outer hull he carried on one shoulder and his own body as well. The salty water thundered into the ocean as it fell, and then carved through the sand of the beach as he trundled up onto the beach and turned to lay the sections of armored metal out in the sun, where they and their internal components and still-attached systems could dry out ahead of further disassembly. More decking stretched out on the beach, stacked into neat piles for forty yards from where he had emerged to the Atlesian-built docks.

He turned as a handful of Faunus, all of them some sort of aquatic in nature, emerged from the water with water-logged canisters of Dust tucked under their arms. A couple of them flicked nervous looks his way, but their leader hissed something chastising at them and they rushed along to join a handful of Faunus working further up the beach, pulling apart the valuable internal components attached to the outer-plating he had extracted.

They were at an efficient pace, and working well as well - his cursory scan showed little waste.

Sufficient, and efficient.

Acceptable.

While they worked, he turned his back and knelt in the sand, scan running along the ends of the container. He found a terminal on either side, locked by a simple pin code lock. Unfortunately, it was a code he did not know. Fortunately, though, he suspected that the only countermeasure in place was an alarm system - he did not detect any broadcast systems that might have activated the machines, or any explosive charges meant to destroy them before others could take them.

Carefully, fingers of his proto-hand steepling into a hard point, he punctured one end of one of the container's walls and then peeled it back. Gently, then, he reached in to pull out the two rows of collapsed droids and laid them out of the beach.

They were decently sized machines, compared to the average Human or Faunus values, and made of blocky black sections. Each had a large power unit on its back with thick power cables that ran down to its hips. Their hands were only three-fingered, however - with a thumb and two large digits besides. Their heads were quite odd, though - round and reflective, but featureless, as though its entire cranium were merely one large camera-system.

Which, a scan showed, was the case, actually.

"Primitive design." But useful enough, and impressive for the common technological base, he supposed. "Insufficient numbers for active field deployments… Labor, though, is possible. And I am in need of laborers."

Laborers that wouldn't talk back, at that…

Useful indeed.

His override code was simple - a system purge that would reprogram the movement routines and bind the machines to his vocal commands - and he uploaded it to each smoothly. But, for safety's sake, he only activated one for the test.

It stood stiffly and turned in an exaggerated, trembling sort of way, its arms trembling and shaking loosely on its shoulder-joints as it turned to face him. Quietly, and with a synthetic, almost warbling, voice it asked, "Directive."

"List command prerogatives." He demanded, leaning his cannon-arm on his knee and looming over the machine.

"Command prerogative list : null." The machine answered simply, "Command prerogative count : zero."

"Update command prerogatives : stand sentry."

"Command prerogatives updated." It intoned, turning and stepping back, facing the sea. "Standing by, General Shockwave."

"General…" Quite a promotion, he supposed, but an appropriate one.

He spent the next few minutes activating each of the droids in turn to verify they were under his control - for safety's sake, he did not wish to waste them on a silly mistake - and then stood. The force was small, primitive, and wholly unarmed. But it was nice to have assistants, even if he was not quite sure what to assign them to do.

He registered the coming of a familiar Scroll-signal and turned, greeting the Faunus with a simple, "Ghira."

"Uh, Shockwave." The man smiled, waving for the Faunus he'd been talking to to linger behind while he approached him, watching the Atlesian droids warily. "What, uh, what're you working on?"

"Securing an expendable labor force." He explained simply, then thought, and added, "All units : update command lists. Obey Ghira Belladonna as secondary to myself."

"Command confirmed." They all intoned mechanically.

"Oh…" Ghira murmured, "Well, that's, uh, interesting."

"Indeed." More importantly, "I trust you have surveyed a location suited to my needs?"

"We have, yeah." Ghira eyed the machines for a moment long and then turned and gestured for him to follow the Faunus. "Come on, we'll show you. You, uh, said you didn't need flat ground right? And that you didn't mind being against the mountain?"

"I said both things, yes."

"Great!" He nodded and turned away, leaving Shockwave to follow him.

The location Ghira had obtained for him was a tree-filled expanse of land at the back of the proverbial settlement, set away and on top of a clambering series of hills that clung to the base of a sheer break-away that reached up for nearly two miles to the tall peak overhead. He pressed a finger to the dark gray rock of the cliff-face and it crumbled easily. Beyond it, though, was a firmer sort of granite, maybe fifteen inches beyond the surface. The ground beneath his feet was similar, with several layers of dry, baked soil shaded by tall, broad-leafed trees who cast the world into shade.

"It's not great for us," Ghira said as Shockwave turned to him, "but, uh, we figured a machine wouldn't need… Food. Or water."

"It is sufficient."

"Yeah?"

"Affirmative." He rumbled, "I will require materials. Those from the Atlesian fleet will do."

"How much do you need…?"

"Much." He answered simply, turning and musing aloud, "Not all. Likely not most. But much of it. The outer hulls will do for the walls and the structures of the ship should be easily modified to serve my needs. The power systems as well. With a moderate amount of adaptation, that is, though that should be-"

"Just take what you need." Ghira cut him off with a laugh and added a wry shake of his head when Shockwave turned to him. "You sank 'em, so you get first rights. That's how this works, Shockwave.

"...Acknowledged." He rumbled quietly, "I will begin my work immediately, then."

Over the next day, Shockwave saw the land cleared of trees and the rare undergrowth that clung to their bottoms. The greenery was, from leafy top to wooden base, useless to him, and so he left it all piled up at the edge of the beach where the Faunus could clearly see both the trees and his lack of care for what was done with them. Next he cleared away the several inches of soft, inadequate and unstable soil. He left it piled to every side of the cleared land, like a small sort of barricade of loose soil and rock.

With the land cleared and suitably prepared, he began moving the required plated hull sections, supports, and other salvage from the beach up to the building area.

He let the drones handle most of that, working in teams to carry the supplies up while he worked on altering them to suit his needs. The support struts needed to be heated and reshaped, many of them had been curved to accommodate the outside of a ship's hull, and needed to be straightened for his use. And then reinforced, to repair the loss in strength from their reshaping. For safety, he used three of each reclaimed support strut, stacked side-to-side in a right angle at each of the four corners of his structure and then enclosed in a smooth piece of molded steel that he attached to the walls to either side.

The structure itself was a hundred feet in diameter, and eighty in height, with four separated floors bridged by ramps slightly wider than Shockwave himself was. They wound up the tower like a matched twin helix that climbed up. Inside, he ran repurposed Atlesian lights across the ceiling and up the edges of the ramps which cast a stark, pale light across the space but left the distant nooks and crannies shadowed almost eerily.

The tower itself was built at an angle, leaning back against the wall at the back of his allotted land and using it for support. This was for safety - to accommodate for repurposed and reclaimed support materials until he could cyber-form it all. The outside was also mottled and mismatched, with darker black sections where the hull had been painted such on one part of the ship, and then a stretch of the silver that fronted each vessel's prows. There were also windows, some of which even had their glass still, which he did his best to lay out neatly but nonetheless could not entirely control.

But, for now, it would be…

Sufficient for his needs.

Using the more advanced power and computer systems he had salvaged, he set to work first on a basic cyber-former system, which would be able to melt down various allows and reconfigure them molecularly into more useful cyber-matter. The machine necessary was large, constrained as he was by primitive, inefficient supplies, and ringed the base level in its near entirety. Exhaust vents climbed up the back wall, and ran all the way to the apex of the tower where the heat and smoke was vented away against the cliff of the mountain overhead, where the Faunus were less likely to see it.

His next project was a power generation system, which occupied the third floor and consisted of a simple pair of systems. One was a Dust powered generator and translator system, which fueled the compatible power systems in his tower directly and bled off excess power into a simplistic battery system which was then connected to a power translator which, on demand, rendered the power into something compatible for his own physiology and his cyber-former below. The secondary system was one borrowed from his time on Earth.

A large wind turbine, which he erected on the southern side of his tower at the third floor, which connected to a massive turbine-conductor system that occupied most of the rest of the space on that floor.

"Shockwave!" He heard Ghira's voice as he entered, arriving precisely when he calculated he would do based on one of his sentries' reports.

"Ghira Belladonna." He intoned, kneeling on the floor and working deftly on the cyber-former's output system, where the raw cyber-matter would be collected and wait once all was done. "You require something?"

"No, no, just… Checking in on you." The Faunus smield, folded his arms and watched him work for a while. Then, finally, he asked, "What, uh, is the spinning thing for? I don't see any grains to mill."

"It is generating power via friction encouraged by the wind." It was a rough explanation, and simplified, but it did the job. When Ghira's brows rose, he explained, "Dust is not an efficient power source for my needs. So, I am using wind power to supplement."

In truth, wind power was only marginally more efficient than Dust - but with Dust in such pained supply, it only made sense to diversify.

"You can do that?"

"Do what?"

"Make power that way."

"Yes." He paused and turned to ask, "Dust is not your only source of power. Is it?"

"Well, some ships use friction generators, relying on the tides as they travel and turning ocean resistance to power." The man shrugged, "But those are expensive to make… And bulky, too. Only the biggest ships can fit them."

"I see…" He paused to consider for only a moment, before he turned back to his work. "I will construct wind turbines on the mountain peaks, if it is so desired."

"You'd do that?"

"I would." He answered simply, mechanically, "With happiness. It would be of benefit to the Faunus, which is my goal."

"Alright, well, uh…" Ghira hummed, watching him work and obviously thinking about the sudden offer. An offer that must have seemed more than kind to him.

In truth, the offer was not as benefecent as it might have seemed. Rather, the abundance of power would only be of service to his needs. Foundries, computer systems, maintenance systems, energon synthesis - all required power. And a great over-abundance of it, in some of these cases. But he could not simply seize this land for construction - such would be overtly hostile, or at least seemingly so - and so posed the idea as an offer instead.

An offer the Faunus seemed to be considering deeply, "I can talk to some folk, see about it. But why up there?"

"Higher peaks have stronger wind currents, generally." He explained simply, "Stronger wind currents, more power. It would also be convenient to the eventuality of establishing defensive measures along the mountain peaks."

"Against the Grimm?"

"And Atlas." Artillery cannons could simply be turned around, after all. Quietly, he turned and regarded the Faunus. "I have work to do, Ghira Belladonna."

"A-Ah, right." He nodded, backing up and turning to leave, "Well, I'll leave you to it, then. See you-"

"I will be ready to begin basic weapons modification within the next two standard cycles." He cut the man off and then added, quietly, "Days. The next two days."

"That's… Great."

"Indeed." He rumbled quietly, "Good day, Ghira Belladonna."

"Uh…" The Faunus nodded his head gently, "Good day, Shockwave?"

Yes.

It was a good day indeed.

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