The shuttle landed gently in the bay. Kiru stepped off and was promptly greeted by Megumi’s hologram materializing before her. “Welcome aboard. Don’t worry about unloading the shuttle. I have some drones on the way to do that for you.”

Tiredly, she thanked Megumi. Who replied, “You four deserve a nice rest. I’ll wake you when we reach Nekuri.”

She nodded, and the four tiredly scrambled out of the shuttle bay. At the same moment, the ship came about, breaking orbit. In a few minutes, she would be underway to the planet Nekuri.

Hours later, the ship silently came out of warp over a lovely world. Second from her sun, with four moons. One of which also had an atmosphere. Nekuri had nine continents, but one of those nine was a supercontinent. It was a massive world but its core wasn’t very dense giving Nekuri a gravity of two-point-zero-seven. However, while the homeworld was mineralogically poor, one of its moons, specifically the one with an atmosphere, was rather rich in minerals and featured a gravity of two-point-three.

Megumi discreetly took several scans of the alien worlds and noted that between the planet, and the habitable moon, the system had a population of twenty-three billion Neku. She did however notice a sizable number of life signs that were not Neku. Exactly what they were, she knew not. As no entity in her database was an exact match. The closest she could find in the database was seventy-three percent genetic match. She made a note to acquire a specimen. They might prove interesting to study at the very least, but given someone was manipulating the Neku from the shadows, these unknowns might very well be that party. At the very least they were likely to be connected to the issue in some fashion. 

While making plans to acquire a specimen, she began focusing her sensors on the ocean floor. The depths of Nekuri’s vast oceans could reach crushing pressures, and there were regions no Neku had visited before. They lacked the technology to plunge to those depths. As such, the ocean floor would make a great place to hide a stargate complex. She already had a few more criteria in mind for that. It needed to be a certain depth, and she wanted it in a geologically stable region. Thankfully, she had sensors that could easily scan the ocean depths without disrupting her cloak or revealing her position to the locals. It helped that she had toys and tricks at her disposal beyond the current understanding of the Neku. The Neku couldn’t even detect the psionic sweeps she was using, or any of the other sensors she was currently using to actively scan their planet. In fact, it was a bit of a rush to know that she was silently hovering over their world with the entire populace none the wiser to her presence. If any of them knew she was here, there would be mass panic.

No doubt or argument about it. Her arsenal contained countless weapons with which she could annihilate the civilization below. Not to mention as a battleship, she was designed to evoke that kind of fear.

Megumi stretched, and her avatar slipped out of the command chair on the bridge. It was technically ship’s night, but it was almost morning. She had timed her arrival so that it would be close to ship’s morning. Giving her a little time to conduct scans before her growing crew started to wake. She glanced around her bridge. Solean bridge design had changed little in the millennia since they first reached the stars. Like any traditional Solean bridge it was split into two levels. The upper command level overlooked the lower control level. Banks of consoles were arranged around the lower level which was circular in shape. The walls of the dome-shaped bridge made up a single massive view screen that provided a panoramic view of everything around the ship. With the exception of below the ship, but the screen could be flipped to show that. There was also a strategic display in the center of the bridge. It occurred to her, now that it was rebuilt, she should probably train a few bridge officers. While she could operate without a crew, there were benefits to having a trained crew.

She pushed the thought to the back of her priority list. As she made her way down to wake Kiru personally, her mind wandered to another subject. Nekuri’s defenses. From her perspective, they were nothing to write home about. The planet and moon colony were both protected by planetary shields, but their strength left quite a bit to be desired. Although it would take a significant fleet at the same tech level as the Neku or the Erali to breach those shields. For her, however, those shields weren’t going to hold up for very long. Although they would last longer than any ship shield. Having access to the planetary power grid and the massive amount of space a planet could provide meant that the shields wouldn’t fail from a single hit from her guns. However, they wouldn’t exactly block the beams either. Only reduce the yield... slightly.

Nekuri was also protected by a number of orbital bases, floating gun platforms, a large garrison of patrolling warships, and planetary ground-to-space batteries. It made her well-fortified like any major world would be expected to be. However, those defenses meant little to her and her plans. That didn’t mean she was ignoring them entirely. Already she had a subroutine dedicated to remotely hacking the defense network, while another was hacking the civil net, and a third was hacking into the communications grid. Every computer system she could find, she had a subroutine already dedicated to hacking into it. In fact, she already had low-level access to every system on the planet. She could have had full access already, but she was trying to be low-key about it. Regardless she expected to have full access within the next minute at the most. Their systems just weren’t equipped to really stop a computer as powerful as she was. Of course, even with their primitive computer hardware, there were computers she could not break into, but that was because of the simple fact that they were completely isolated from the networks. It was a remarkably simple method of security but one that worked quite well. Technically she could hack into it regardless, but that was tricky. Not to mention quite detectable.

Doing so wouldn’t reveal her position, but it would alert anyone looking that someone was hacking into their secure computers. As for why, well that method was well known for seriously disrupting any targeted computing systems and every computer system nearby. Of course, nearby being relative. It would be a five-kilometer radius. Naturally, it would be quieter if a physical asset went down there and stealthy created a downlink. Something she was going to do eventually, as she wanted to know what was on the secure planetary servers.

While most of what data was stored on those servers was likely to be junk. I.E useless to her, some of it might be interesting. Not to mention those servers likely would contain the most useful hints on what was going on here. Assuming the puppeteers allowed anything of interest to be stored on a computer. She already knew from her captured Neku that they were quite through with their memory wiping. While they didn’t wipe everything, key memories were thoroughly obliterated. She couldn’t even recover them, as there was nothing to recover. As for why, she had a couple of theories based on the evidence. She just wasn’t going to speculate, as it served no purpose.

Megumi’s attention was quickly drawn back to the planet as her subroutines started to process new data from the planetary data net. Her subroutines had achieved full access to the data net and were now sifting through exabytes of data. The civilian net alone would take her a while to go through and analyze. Since she was going through it all with a fine-tooth comb so to speak. Her subroutines weren’t going to be done until tomorrow at the earliest. The preliminary data wasn’t all that interesting. At least on the civilian net. As for the defense net, that was a little more interesting, but nothing groundbreaking, yet.

Another subroutine report drew her attention elsewhere on the planet. Her scans had located a perfect site for a new stargate complex. Megumi started launching the specialized drones and noted the site. It was deep, very deep in the darkest depths of Nekuri’s ocean, where the crushing pressures were the greatest dangers. It was too deep for all but the strangest lifeforms to live. To be specific, the site was just over 16000 meters below sea level. Despite the significant depth, it wasn’t the deepest region of the planet’s oceans. It was however geologically stable with a very thick and rocky seafloor. It was deep enough that any Neku submersible would be crushed trying to reach the site, but her own craft could easily withstand those pressures. Shield or no shield, modern Solean ships had the structural integrity to withstand immense pressures far in excess of what that ocean could subject.

Her mind then switched tracks to consider what style of gate complex she wanted to build. The most common and mundane style was the pressure dome style complex. It had its advantages, and was the lowest tech solution to the intense pressures exerted by the sheer weight of the water at that depth. Especially given the planetary gravity levels. However that style did present a few drawbacks, and forced certain limitations. A more advanced style was the Atlantis style. This style got rid of the pressure dome entirely in favor of an energy shield projected around the complex. The use of a shield over physical matter removed most of the limitations and would let her build pretty much however she wanted. However that shield did require a continuous supply of energy, and was harder to conceal. Not impossible to conceal, just harder. She was honestly leaning towards Atlantis style.

A massive central structure, connected to five docking hubs was soon projected into her mind’s eye. She added lodgings, storage areas, vehicle repair bays, automated factories. Each of the six hubs was given its own shield generator in addition to the primary shield generator in the central hub. She added a series of phased plasma batteries for defense, along with drone launchers. By the time she was done setting up her template she had what amounted to a small underwater city. The architecture she had chosen was distinctly Terran, but that style was common for Solean use as well. 

With its construction already underway, and everything she needed taken care of, she finally reached her destination. Kiru’s quarters. As Megumi’s biomech avatar approached the door, it automatically opened to reveal a scene she hadn’t quite been expecting. Then again she had not been paying any attention to these quarters. Megumi wasn’t sure what to do, and called up the surveillance footage for the quarters. Her significant processing power allowing her to review it in mere seconds. Now that she knew what happened, the question became what does she do about it?