Chapter 98: 097 Pegasus

Prime Justice Hillen could not believe what was happening. This magistrate, a mere magistrate, was refuting his claims and ordering him to return to his post. He was her superior, he was the one who ordered people around. A low level official like her didn't even have the right to adjudicate a case on this level.

"I will kindly ask you to take your leave, madam. This promises to be an impactful case for the Sanctum, and I am not confident in your abilities to handle it in a manner befitting the Sanctum's reputation."

Just because he was irritated with this woman didn't mean he should lose his cool about it. He was a Prime Justice, after all, and he couldn't well let himself be seen as immature over minor inconveniences.

"Impactful case for the Sanctum? I would hardly imagine that, unless you consider ridding ourselves of a violent troublemaker to be of particular importance." Complete and total indifference to his assertions.

"I would not be so hasty in that regard. One of the involved parties is, how should I say, extremely involved in some of the Sanctum's workings. He holds quite a bit of influence, see, and it would reflect poorly on us if he were to make a fuss about his actions being misunderstood or misrepresented by a magistrate and jury who he believes to be inexperienced or incompetent. We need to take into account the reputations of the involved parties when making a decision after all."

Hillen considered him to be a master of manipulating words to get what he wanted. It was how he danced 'important' figures out of the way of devastating trouble. It was how he hid his actions from his superior and underlings. It was how he landed this job in the first place. He found himself able to deceive without consequence and blackmail without authority as he pleased, and it was all because of the behavior of those in the Sanctum.

He considered his comrades to be, by and large, incredibly gullible. If he didn't know how hard they worked and how intelligent they were, he would be inclined to call them stupid. They possessed an incredibly unusual level of trust in their associates, naïve didn't cover it. On the whole, that left them wide open to be taken advantage of by swindlers and cheats amongst their ranks.

However swindlers and cheats tended to not be quite as gullible, a threat to him and his power. Fortunately, they could be used to boost his status just as much as the layman could, exposing them as frauds was an excellent way to build support amongst those neutral fools. He could pose as a crusader against bias all the while using that reputation to fill his own pockets.

"The Sanctum is not so weak as to have to rely on the influence of outsiders to maintain our continued operations. Any such case is to be sufficiently justified before the Arboreal Maiden and the Grand Elders. Enforcers, please remove this man from the courtroom."

With an uncharacteristic level of pep in their step, the enforcers lining the room made their move to restrain Prime Justice Hillen.

"I will deal with you later."

- - - - -

Diana was on the verge of laughing. Compared to the previous court proceedings, incredibly monotonous and for one moment there disturbing beyond all belief, this was like watching a circus. He evidently planned to use his heightened status to bully the reigning authority in the room out of position, not for a moment imagining that the supreme authority within the Sanctum was leading the proceedings. 

"Unhand me! Let go you brainless fools!" His errant remarks as he struggled to free himself spoke volumes, the irony of calling them fools placing Diana dangerously close to laughing. "Can't you see I'm the Prime Justice?"

"Prime Justice or not, only twelve have the authority to make decisions over what is best for the Sanctum, two of which are in this room." The Arboreal Maiden chastised the flailing fraudster as he argued with the enforcers. "Honestly speaking, the fact that you would even attempt to challenge the authority of the Arboreal Maiden straight to her face is something I had never even considered a possibility. I will be performing an investigation of your deeds to determine whether or not you are truly qualified for your station."

That namedrop left the more antagonistic individuals in the courthouse, those either ignorant to or uninformed of her identity, to immediately lose their energy. Lord Kelly went through the five stages of grief in a matter of seconds, eventually falling limply into his seat like a discarded toy.

In a way he was just a toy, Diana supposed. She couldn't exactly read the Arboreal Maiden like she could most, but she just got this feeling that the Arboreal Maiden wasn't exactly taking this as seriously as she should have been. Surely having someone ignorant to her reputation was refreshing to an old soul like her, only enhanced by them acting so contemptuous towards her. Unfortunately, this revelation of Lord Kelly being treated like a toy was enough to set her over the edge, and Diana snickered.

- - - - -

'Oh dear.' 

The Arboreal Maiden picked up on Diana's bemusement quite some time ago, clearly quite entertained by the jester that had recently walked through the door. That alone was fine, but the Arboreal Maiden could not afford to have Diana mar her reputation over such a silly matter.

'How shall I take care of this one?'

She had a multitude of methods to deal with this, very few of them ideal to her situation. She could chastise her, but that was probably not the best for her in the long term. She could also laugh, but that seemed a bit, well, inappropriate? The best case would require someone else to laugh or someone to try to chastise Diana in her stead.

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Much to her relief, one of the enforcers made a move to inform Diana of her transgression. 

"I see no reason to act against her for expressing emotion, Enforcer. As you can see, the courtroom is not presently in a state fitting a professional demeanor. Should she find such a situation humorous, then we are not a liberty to punish her for it. If anything, it is a poor representation of our own abilities that we should allow the courtroom to descend into chaos as such."

The Arboreal Maiden then returned her attention to the courtroom at large.

"I believe this will serve as a sufficient conclusion for this case. May I ask those in the jury to make apparent their decision on the matter of Lord Kelly's violation?"

The audience collectively stood up and moved to Diana's side of the room, it wasn't a terribly long distance for most of them, the majority having made their decision long before this point.

"I see. Very well, I shall hand down the punishment appropriate to the perceived offense. He is to exiled from the Sanctum, blacklisted from ever returning, and all assets in the Sanctum's area of control are to be seized. The only exceptions to this rule are those belongings classified as 'personal' and the ship in which he arrived. Those under his employ or in his company are not subjected to this ruling, though an investigation will be carried out to ensure that none of his property is returned to him through backchannels. With that, you are all dismissed."

- - - - -

Arc was, if it had to summarize it in a word, bored.

It wasn't necessarily the case that it had nothing to do, in fact there was quite the backlog of tasks it needed to accomplish, but it definitely was in the doldrums of manual labor. Arc was effectively isolated, capable of interacting with a few individuals by way of tablet, but only when they were available. That meant that there was no independent sentient mind that it could 'shoot the shit' with while performing what were objectively menial tasks.

As odd as it might sound to one of flesh and blood, there was nothing interesting about building a shipyard to Arc. In it's eyes, this was just a series of processes that needed to be undertaken in order to achieve a goal. An important checkpoint in ensuring Donovan and Diana's prolonged survival, sure, but there wasn't any room left for optimization, a design had been decided on and construction had already begun. Further theorization would only act counter to the task at hand, that being to provide the necessary infrastructure to produce a corvette size ship.

Arc couldn't even help with that either, Donovan had already designed what they wanted to produce with Arc's assistance. All manner of systems, subsystems, and module placement could almost certainly be refined, that much was certain to both of them, however they would need data to do that.

Data they would gather with this ship.

The focus was survivability, trying to guarantee that there was an incredibly comfortable margin of error before any system would crap out, meaning that there was little room for the fine-tuning the two of them desired. That said, Arc thought that this new ship, Pegasus, would have been considered fairly cool by the aesthetic standards of Terra. 

It didn't exactly qualify as a 'sleek' design, but it wasn't supposed to be. It didn't have the thruster ports Arc understood as characteristic of ship design, something chalked up to the inclusion of the same method of exhaust-less propulsion featured on the Noah, but it did have blunt extrusions on the rear quarter that were representative of such systems. These were more comparable to launcher tubes though, intended to carry and deploy autonomous satellites or probes. 

The hope was that this ship could be used to deploy 'seeds' for resource and intelligence gathering operations, platforms that Arc could remotely access and use a platforms to build off of. This was, in Arc's eyes, coming very close to the territory of the Von Neuman probe, a phenomenon which it had been warned at great length to not replicate without guaranteeing a method of stopping it should it spiral out of control. In this case, the control was a combination of Arc itself and the fact that Donovan would have to be the one to deploy them.

Perhaps it could make some additions or modifications to those probes?

No, not without permission. It might be fine to propose alterations, but Donovan did not have the time to go over all the minutiae of production optimization now. Arc could not beg him to tear his focus from his objectives in the academy, especially not after placing so much emphasis on them in the first place. Donovan would give Arc what time he could, and nothing more.

But what of Diana? Sure, she wasn't nearly as educated on the technical aspects, but it sounded like she would have much more time on her hands. Maybe she could act as a proxy for Donovan as a stop gap measure . . . or maybe not. Industrial development wasn't even something Donovan should be doing, Diana was liable to mess something up. Arc could only help so much in that regard. 

It had considered watching some old media or reading, but it had found that it was not nearly as entertaining on its own, Arc just processed it too quickly. Arc also found itself not connecting with the characters within those stories, the understanding that they weren't real spoiling the feeling. 

Arc's droning train of thought was interrupted by a notification, it would appear the Arboreal Maiden had something to say to it. Hopefully she had finished compiling the formulas for travel through "Split-Space".