I’d hardly taken five steps before I got a call from Alana.
“How are things on your end?” she asked immediately.
“Just finished up. You?” I replied, though I assumed she was contacting me because she had cleared her own hive as well.
“Still got a ways to go, unfortunately. The Antithesis burrowed down into the bottom of the quarry and we need to root them out, but they didn’t have time to grow anything too nasty. I’m glad you had good news though, because something just came up,” Alana told me, unknowingly contradicting my thoughts.
“Something bad, I take it,” I predicted.
“A little bit of yes and a little bit of no. Dylta just notified me that your little trap was triggered. Seems like it caught the entire group, no survivors. More importantly, their transports are still parked outside,” she explained. I side-eyed Juny.
“Just a moment,” I told Alana, switching channels. “Alright, fess up. No way you didn’t know about this, so why am I hearing it from her first?”
“Dylta and I were notified at the same time and we agreed that it would fill Alana in while I handled the cyber-intrusion so that she would have time to evaluate the tactical situation before speaking to you,” Juny answered with seeming honesty.
“Cyber-intrusion?” I asked.
“The corporate personnel carriers contained basic AI that would have allowed them to self-destruct if they were in danger of capture or if all members’ transponders stopped responding. Using a surveillance drone, I was able to infiltrate them both and delete their AI, and I then attempted to trace them back to their origins,” she went on to explain. I nodded, guessing it was the ‘attempted’ part that caused it to take so long. I switched back to Alana.
“Sorry about that, Juny was filled me in on some of the details,” I informed her. “So it sounds like we have some spoils of war?”
“Yeah, but the problem is someone is going to notice they lost contact with their people and investigate eventually, especially if they were expecting their transports back,” Alana explained. I could see where this was going.
“I’ll head back and secure them since I’m already done here, but couldn’t we have them piloted back remotely?” I volunteered, in addition to pointing out one thing that stood out to me.
“We can, but we have no way of knowing if the transports are being used as a Trojan Horse somehow, so I think it would be prudent to investigate them before bringing them into Boone,” Alana answered, giving reasoning I probably should have caught myself.
“And Juny has the best sensors, of course…not to mention you still need both teams if you’re going to both protect the town and clear the hive,” I continued for her. “I’ll see about recovering the bodies too- hard to say how much might have survived, but Haley was aiming to collapse the building, not incinerate intruders.”
“Good idea; take some construction drones and have them shift the rubble out of the way. I doubt you’ll find much, and anything they were carrying will probably just give us a false lead, but you never know what might unintentionally give us more information than intended,” Alana advised.
“Will do. I’ll take the Sparrowhawk back immediately then.”
“Thanks, and be careful. I’ll be seeing you back at base,” Alana said before closing the channel.
“Juny, go ahead and call the Sparrowhawk to this position- I’ll apologize to Alvarez for stealing his air support,” I instructed before doing as I said. Once that was over with and I was aboard the transport, heading back home at full speed, I returned to an earlier topic.
“You said you attempted to trace them back? So you didn’t have any luck with that?” I asked Juny.
“Correct! The transports are military surplus sold to a scrapyard which has no record to selling them afterwards. Checking their flight records reveals only a single trip starting from a truck stop on the highway,” she reported.
“So they deleted all the records from before that? Is there no chance of recovering them?” I questioned.
“It appears as if there were no previous records. It’s possible they were brought to their starting point by another vehicle to cover their tracks,” Juny suggested.
“Or that there’s more to that truck stop than meets the eye. Might be a waste of time, but see if you can find anything else there- or any trace of how the transports got to it,” I instructed, watching as Juny bobbed up and down as an affirmation. “At any rate, I can see why Alana was suspicious. It’s odd that no one noticed you’d bricked their transports before leaving; I’d think that would have tipped them off that something was wrong. And they didn’t leave anyone behind on them?”
“I was able to convince them that a software error was responsible, of course. Since the transports shared software and had recently received factory resets and subsequent updates, it was credible that they would encounter the same error after identical flights. With the transports also operating on autopilot to begin with, there were no pilots to remain behind,” Juny explained, clearing up my doubts.
The trip home was as boring as the trip out, but soon we arrived at the former site of Reentry’s base, which was now nothing more than a pile of rubble. Haley had done a good job; from what I recalled of the floor plan, it looked like the entire structure had come down, even if the supports had probably survived. It was hard to say since the base had been underground and a lot of earth had fallen down to cover them up.
“Any chance you have footage of the detonation?” I asked as the Sparrowhawk came in for a landing near the transports.
“Of course! Would you like to view it now?”
“I’ll wait until I can show it to Haley. I’m sure she’ll appreciate getting to see it first…and she might start thinking about how explodable I am if I don’t,” I told Juny, mostly joking. “Anyway, go ahead and scan those transports if you haven’t already.”
“Scans have already been completed. Several intrusion programs were located and deleted. Other than that, they appear to be severely outdated armored personnel carriers, among the first to be outfitted with hover technology.” Well, that sounded almost too good to be true, so I waited for the other shoe to drop. “These two in particular have also been equipped with numerous explosives, setting any of which off will detonate the rest!”
“Yeah, not even surprised about that. Is it safe to get close, or should we get a drone to disarm the bombs first?” I asked before approaching. It was mostly just to be safe; Juny probably already disarmed any that could be disarmed remotely and would have figured out how not to trigger the rest.
“As long as you refrain from touching any of the highlighted components,” Juny confirmed…before what seemed like half of each vehicle lit up in red.
“They really didn’t do things halfway, did they?” I commented with a whistle. “Not touching that with a ten-foot pole. Call some of the drones back at base out here to handle the disarming.”
“Already on the way!” Juny responded. Technically we did have the four cheap drones from our last mission stowed on the Sparrowhawk, but none of them had manipulator arms built in.
With that on hold, I headed over to the ruins not far away. Construction robots the size of buses hovered over the wreckage scooping soil and debris up and dropping it to the side. Unusually for me, the design I’d used wasn’t intended for this purpose. I hadn’t been able to think of a construction machine in any games I’d played or visual media I’d watched that had the right profile.
Most tended to be humanoid, and often were manned, though that was something I could have worked around. The only other example I could think of at the time was the Protoss probe, but I couldn’t find a way to give it all the needed functionality with only Class I tech- I would have needed a lot of miniaturization, dimensional shunting, or remote manipulation tech to make those machines work owing to their odd shape and small profiles.
So instead I’d gone with the Enforcer Sentinel, a heavy combat robot. Its large frame and its arms were perfect for the job- I could easily fit all sorts of construction tools into the arms and they could also be used to lift heavy loads, especially when I refitted the weapon and shield arms for further utility. Combined with the way its arms curled under its body, I was able to work out a design where it could carry loose debris like dirt by digging its claws in and activating a hover array that faced inwards.
It was perfect for excavating the ruins of outer Boone as well as Reentry’s ruined base. With much of the recovered materials going into more of these drones, our progress was accelerating over time. Most of the Antithesis biomatter was still buried pretty deep, if we’re talking about Boone, but Juny was keeping an eye on it and would alert us if anything started growing. So far the seeds that survived the landslide were being stymied by the metal frames of the buildings, which prevented them from finding the space to establish new hives now that they were twisted and broken.
I set aside the reflecting as one of the machines finally uncovered something- some bodies, with one almost completely exposed. It seemed these were more crushed than blown up, so their equipment was mostly recognizable if nothing else. I called the drones off for a moment while I took a closer looking, examining the armor and the weapon its wearer held in their clutches.
“Doesn’t look like they had anything useful…” I said to myself as I looked it over. The armor was nearly identical to that of the corporate security we’d fought at the tail end of the siege, but this time it was unmarked. Given that the armor itself wasn’t proprietary, that meant it was impossible to use it to trace the wearers.
“Their weapon appears to be more advanced than the ones carried by the previous teams- it would prove a credible threat to the best of Class I armor and it would be dangerous to attempt to ‘tank’ it even with your current gear!” Juny advised me as I looked over the person’s gun. It didn’t look special, but I also didn’t recognize it. Neither of those things meant much since I wasn’t really a weapons expert.
“That proves they can punch at an even higher weight class than we thought,” I muttered while turning the weapon over in my hands. “But why would they equip a team with such good weapons while rigging their vehicles like they expected them to be captured…?”
It was a seeming contradiction. Their employers didn’t seem to expect these people to be returning judging by how many traps they’d placed on the APCs, and their armor was off-the-shelf and unmarked. So why give them weapons that give us a better understanding of their capabilities?
“No, I’m asking the wrong question…what I should be wondering is that they want me to take away from this,” I said to myself. Maybe I was being paranoid, but it seemed to me that the only way this made sense was if the goals was, itself, to show us these weapons. Throwing an expendable team our way knowing they wouldn’t return and sending them through a secret passage we’d had plenty of time to locate didn’t make sense strategically unless it was for misinformation.
I could also just be overestimating our shadowy enemy’s intelligence, of course, but I’d rather do that than underestimate them with more dire consequences.
Love it when the right hand is just off when typing lol. Pretty sure chapter name is supposed to be Chapter, not Cja[ter yes?
So check with the family you are now part of, they will be able to help. She should also be checking with her mom, she obviously knows how to understand this stuff from being such a huge gamer.
Now our girl is thinking with portals
🍪➡️🪤