Chapter 367 (1/2)
The ship dropped into the Oort Cloud, beyond the Kuiper Belt, from hyperspace. It let the energy bleed off the hyperdrives as it used a crawler drive to move slowly away from its entry space. It fired a single drone with a faux-hyperdrive and massive scanners, then shifted position. It shut down all emissions, used a graviton generator to eliminate its mass profile and gravatic signature, and slowly moved into a diffuse cloud of H2O crystals and waited.
A patrol appeared less than three days later, nosing around, scanning the area tightly. After a few days of searching the patrol left.
The ship stayed silent and dark.
Twice more patrols appeared, spreading out, looking for whatever had appeared briefly.
The third time they found the probe as it accidentally leaked a power signature. The ships leaped on it, opening fire on it and destroying it. They then backtraced it to the position the ship had entered on, over two light seconds from where it currently drifted, slowly absorbing H2O crystals.
For a month the ship drifted, using powerful passive sensors, moving through clouds of frozen gasses and liquids, absorbing what it could until its storage tanks were filled.
The ship oriented, seeking out the lone inhabited planet in the system, and engaged its hyperdrive.
It streaked back into existence just at the gravity well limit and activated its powerful engines and deployed its heavy duty screens.
Through the system the alarm went out. The ship's profile could only be from one species. The markings on the hull corresponded with the organization that every being in the planet feared.
The ship powered down through the atmosphere. The computers had located a suitable landing spot and drove hard for it. A mere two thousand feet above the ground it decoupled the reentry shielding, filling the air with chaff and flares and EM scatter, and dropped to the ground. Powerful retrorockets flared, slowing the craft down, baking the land beneath it to a hard almost concrete.
The ship set down. It immediately shifted. The engines were pulled into the hull and powerful grinders ripped apart the machinery. The hull flattened, extended out, put down pylons, and shifted shape.
Inside the ship circuitry engaged. The cloning bank activated, creating a single body. The body was clothed, placed in a comfortable command chair by robotics, and a neural jack thumped into place at the base of the being's skull. Neural templates were loaded up in less than a minute.
The system sent a jolt of electricity through the being's nervous system and gave the body a kick to the chest to start the heart and lungs.
Commander Jane Marcus Prastini opened her eyes, looking around quickly. She looked down, noted her body was male this time, and closed her eyes, adjusting her thinking. She knew it was random, but sometimes it felt to her like the system was loaded to produce males more than females when her body spawned.
She blinked several times and sat up, looking at her control board. A few upgrades since the last time she'd used it which was, according to the chronometer, eighty-two years ago. A long cold-sleep, sure, but not too bad. She looked up at her screens, saw they were blank, and quickly brought her interface online.
It took her less than fifteen seconds to put her interface together. She knew she had to work fast, so she went with the bare bones. She'd customize it later.
According to her topography map, made by the ship as it dropped in, she was a half-mile from a delta that was covered in vegetation to the north-east, mountains twenty miles to the west, ocean to the east, rolling plains and the beginnings of suburbs and cities to the south-west.
As she was looking over the maps she was already issuing commands to her system. She needed more work droids, so she ordered six of them up in the queue. She needed point defense online, so she set one of her four working on building that. Two of them she set working on building a cloning banks with a basic issue nanoforge system. The last one she set to building intake pipes out of the delta that would pull in water and biomass, run the biomass through grinders, and dump it into the biomass tanks.
She knew she didn't have long. The first five minutes were the most crucial in her profession.
And the being in command of the military forces on the planet was a priority target. Countering and eliminating him was more important than even seizing the real estate.
Still, Jane worked fast, allocating her precious biomass, mass tank contents, and quickly setting jobs out for her worker drones.
Jane's ship had been on the ground ninety seconds and she'd been awake for sixty of them.
The clock was running.
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Sma'akamo'o was the Planetary Defense Most High, a job he had come to regret taking the last two months. First there had been the hyperspace signal out in the Oort Cloud. While the Executor Most High had insisted that Sma'akamo'o's equipment must have been in error since the signal was so brief and weak, Sma'akamo'o knew it was the Terrans.
When he had found the probe, the Executor Most High had been furious at being proved wrong.
Still, Sma'akamo'o had had that feeling. You know the one. That one you get when you are walking alone and suddenly know someone or something has decided that you're the victim on the Predator is Right gameshow that you didn't know you had signed up for.
”It looks as if the ship broke apart just south of the Ta'amista'ar Delta,” the Executor Security Most High was stating, his head lifted up as he gazed down his long nose at everyone.
”I will reserve judgement until aerospace craft run a search pattern in the area,” Sma'akamo'o said. He pointed out at the flickering and grainy holotank where several diamonds were moving toward the area.
”You act like an elderly Telkan broodcarrier, seeing Terrans under every piece of furniture and behind every door,” Lo'opado'o sneered.
Sma'akamo'o turned slowly, his hooves clattering on the floor. For a moment he looked just like every other Lanaktallan. Then the side of his face flickered, had resolution lines flow through it. The prosthetic hologram vanished.
The entire side of his face was a mass of scar tissue. A crude cybernetic eye, the best Lanaktallan cybertechnology could provide, stared at Lo'opado'o.
”At least I have seen them,” Sma'akamo'o said coldly. ”You may judge my caution after your first battle with Terran Confederate Space Force.”
The other Lanaktallan drew back slightly as Sma'akamo'o reactivated his prosthetic hologram and went back to staring at the holotank. The Most High had fought the Terrans three times and survived the experience. The fourth time was legendary. He had managed to force a Terran carrier group to jump out of the system through geometry, careful maneuvering, and denying them access to any of the gas giants, losing only 14% of the ten thousand ships he had sent against the forty Terran ships.
A grand victory that his scarring rubbed in the faces of his rivals.
The scars on his flank from where he had suffered an injury at the hands of the Terran infantry were visible to all as he stared at the holotank.
”This world is resource poor. A single Terran ship presents no threat,” Lo'opado'o stated. ”The asteroid belt is mined out and any rare noble gasses have been removed from the gas giants. The most this planet has is some scattered iron deposits.”
”Give me a geological makeup of the Delta and the mountains,” Sma'akamo'o ordered.
The functionary threw up the data and Sma'akamo'o stared at it. He turned to Lo'opado'o and pointed at the holotank with one whirring and clicking cyberarm that replaced the arm that had been burned away when the armored vehicle Sma'akamo'o had been riding in had taken a glancing hit from a Terran tank.
”No resources? Then what do you call that?” Sma'akamo'o asked.
The Executor Security Forces Most High leaned forward, squinting at the icons, then shook his jowls and laughed. ”Petroleum? Unrefined bio-carbon?”
Sma'akamo'o pointed at the delta itself. ”Brackish water, a mixture of seawater and fresh water after the fresh water's journey down from the mountains, laden with chemicals from industrial and urban runoff.”
”So? What, the Terran might build some plastic armor and rush us with a plastic sword?” the Corporate Security Most High, one Eye'likmo'oney sneered.
Sma'akamo'o held back his temper. It had been getting worse over the last year since he had been released from the hospitals. His stomachs, all four of them, churned with acid as he pulled out a wad of medicud.
”Plastic for wiring insulation, ablative soft armor, soft internal structures,” Sma'akamo'o answered. He looked back at the busy functionaries. ”I want a seismic reading.”
It took less than thirty seconds for the earthquake monitors to come online. Normally used to warn of infrequent earthquakes out in the ocean, the techs were cranking up the sensitivity.
”Look at that. Heavy industrial drilling. The ship did not 'break up' but instead made landing,” Sma'akamo'o said.
”Who cares? One ship? You yourself fought ten times that number and emerged victorious just eight months ago,” Eye'likmo'oney said, his voice dripping with condescension.
”And lost thirty times their number just in armored vehicles,” Sma'akamo'o answered. He looked up. ”How much longer till the aerospace scouts are over the area?”
”Ninety seconds, Most High,” the technician answered.
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Jane saw the three groups of ten aerospace fighters, all in wedges, heading toward her as her basic sensors came on. A glance showed she had six point defense and two anti-air batteries up. She checked the status of her resource tap drill and ground her teeth. Three thousand feet to go, the drill chewing up a hundred feet a second.
The pipeline from the Delta was almost finished, but she had a feeling she better use her biomass or lose it. She ordered up four squads of infantry, Born Whole templates, basic armor and weapons, and watched as the forcegrowth tanks started burning through the biomass. She'd be almost dry, but it might be worth it.
The heavy military nano-forge, a Class-VII, wouldn't be complete and online for another three and a half minutes.
Too late.
She looked over her board, looked at her map, then looked at her base, and nodded.
It would have to do.
The enemy areospace were less than thirty seconds from visual range.
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The enemy base appeared on the holotank. A low squat building, odd looking, with slanted edges. Another building that gave no clue as to what they were.
The air defense pods started firing, multi-barrel kinetic weapons that fired shards of metal at the aerospace recon fighters. Two launched missiles.
Close range point defense knocked the missiles out of the air.
One aircraft exploded, then another, then another.
Then it was the Terran's turn to take enemy fire.
The missiles were launched, almost all of them were knocked out of the air. One hit a robotic drone that was carrying a stack of piping, the other hit the side of one of the buildings and exploded, scorching and denting the armor. A team of ten soldiers ran out of one building, all of them firing their magnetic accelerator rifles at the aerospace fighters.
Then the recon craft were past, hitting their afterburners to open the range up.