3

I spent the rest of the day learning how to use the various systems now built into the ceiling of my bedroom. I set the weapons to auto-target everyone that approaches but not to fire unless under attack and yes vandalism, violence, and theft count as attacks. I set the communications system to listening for antithesis locations and any mention of me or my base. I link my phone, armor, and neural set to the master control system. I was hoping for some aliens to kill nearby but alas if there are they have not been seen. I do however find mentions of four people who are almost certainly vanguard, one man and three women. The man is in Japan and pilots a 40 foot tall humanoid robot that looks like it came out of an anime, one of the women is in South Africa driving around on a massive hover tank, another is in Germany and controls a huge fleet of armed drones, and the last is in Brazil running around looking like a green and yellow iron man (iron woman). There are other people who may be vanguard as well but its hard to tell as if they are the most they've done is provide machine guns to and other conventional weapons free of charge to the people near them during antithesis attacks. I also hear that this all started about a year ago during what looked like a meteor shower that occurred after what was then thought then be an asteroid on a collision course with earth was blown up just outside of the atmosphere.

Eventually I end up going to bed and I wake up the next morning to find an Osprey landing outside of my base. By the time I get down stair and out what I consider my front door (the south facing one) a group of Army and Marine personnel have gathered just outside of the Osprey's loading ramp and once I am noticed they begin walking towards me in a distinctly nonthreatening yet disciplined manor. I walk down the steps and end up meeting them at the bottom of them, I may not like people but I have tremendous respect for the Usian armed forces. The one I believe to be in charge introduces herself as lieutenant colonel Xiao Rou and after I introduce myself and ask what brings the army to my door she proceeds to explain.

As it turns out ever since the invasion began the military has been scrambling to take out the plants everywhere they they can find them but they have been spread thin because the enemy is scattered and if left alone they start hives. When the powers that be discovered the existence of the vanguard they determined that the military needed to try to forge an alliance with at least one. When CCTV footage from the city to the south caught signs of my battle with the hive hear followed by a report from an evac of civilians and the appearance of my base the army took the initiative to form a rapid response team and sent them hear to meet me and offer a proposal. The proposal is that if I agree to it the army will assign the squad she brought the Osprey they came in and other vehicles as needed I would be given the rank of colonel with equivalent pay and benefits and royalties on any equipment that I offer to give if I so choose to the military to reverse engineer. In exchange for all of that I would be expected to respond to and help eliminate the alien threat. I say okay but this is my base of operations.

My canons choose that moment to aim skyward and open fire clearly the soldiers are well trained as they all draw weapons and aim up as well only to see nothing but empty sky. I quickly explain that the canons are targeting antithesis in space 7.5 astronomical units (AU) out. While they process that I ask if they can give me a ride to the closest hive, and when they agree we load up and are soon flying east. On the way I explain my plan and they verify that they can stay airborne long enough, the rest if the flight is spent discussing our various experience fighting the plants. When we arrive the Osprey turns 180 degrees and the ramp opens, I nod at LTC Rou and go stealth before taking flight. Less than a minute later I drop a nanite dispersal bomb and equip puff and as she starts to fire a I drop stealth and begin the spiral of death. It doesn't take long before the Osprey lands and the squad piles out guns ready and legs in motion, 8 stay and guard the vehicle, while 8 go left and 8 go right moving along the inside of the dead zone watching for any strays. Soon enough the is dead and dissolving and I'm back to my mbr picking off strays where needed. After a while we load back up and fly back to base. After consulting with Raif I make my own proposal to LTC Rou, if they are willing once our arrangement is finalized I will provide everyone in the squad with their own shadow walker neural set and annihilator armor.

Once back at the base I bid the squad farewell and head back inside as they fly back to their base to report and get everything finalized. Once Raif verifies I have enough points, it is apparent that taking out antithesis incursion pods is extremely profitable, I finish furnishing the base linking the computers, matter synthesizers, and such to the master control system, although I leave the armory levels empty for now. Once I'm done with that I order the blueprints and specs for all of my current equipment as well as the sensor arrays and my canons and feed them all into my armory matter synthesizers. Having completed all of my tasks I do my daily exercises then lounge around in bed reading until I fall asleep.

I wake up early because my canons started blasting away at about 4 am and so I do my daily exercises and eat some breakfast in order to try out the matter synthesizers, from now on I will call them mater synths or just synths. I found myself sitting on my front steps having just finished a smoke when two Ospreys arrived and the squad from yesterday and some military brass filed out and came up the stairs. After introductions I read and signed a contract before I told the squad to go explore the base while LTC Rou and I accompanied the brass back to their Osprey and I summoned a synth for military use and promptly installed a few blueprints before hand the top brass guy an instruction manual.

I then gave the LTC a tour after which the squad gathered outside while I explained how the neural sets worked before ordering and passing them out. Once they all installed those I had Raif collect all off their names and ranks branches and sizes before ordering the armors. Once everyone found the right armor they equipped them and began running, jumping and flying around to get used to them. While they familiarized themselves with the armor I browsed sensor data, and then antithesis reports, and discovered a few new vanguard. Some surfer in Hawaii had a flying laser shooting surf board, a teenage girl in Australia had forty foot long mechanical millipede bristling with plasma casters, in Russia a guy turned him self into a cyborg, and a scientist in Antarctica was using some crazy

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cryogenic hand canons. There were still the people giving out weapons in almost industrial quantities who might be vanguard but they could just be conscientious weapons manufacturers.

My canons went off again while the squad were training and I looked at the sensor feed again and had Raif plot out where all the sensor had spotted them on a map of the solar system, I asked if she could extrapolate their paths and projected targets. I had an feeling that something was off looking at the map and soon enough Raif showed me her projections, and suddenly I had questions.

Could they survive on Mars? Could they thrive? Could they survive on Mercury? What about Venus? What about the moon? Any one of the many other moons? What if their space pod hit a asteroid? They can't survive in a gas giant can they? How do they survive in space? How do they manage interstellar transportation? How do they even launch these pods? How doe they know where to aim them? Do they aim them or do they just fling them out every which way? Raif tells me that yes they could likely survive on any of those planets, moons, and asteroids, though the atmosphere of Venus might be to acidic. As far as how they launch and aim the incursion pod she remains silent. And now I feel the need to defend not just my beloved home world but also the entire system it resides in.

I am interrupted form musings by at alert that a small town north of Pittsburgh has reported antithesis activity. Because it has been sent out across the neural set network the squad quickly gathers and little time passe before we find ourselves aboard the Osprey headed south. We spend the flight planing out our attack and ensuring our weapons are ready and once the town is in sight we prep for drop and the ramp opens. Because the enemy is scouting from the woods east of the town we drop two Marines and two Army into the middle of town to take out any plants in side it before the rest of the squad is dispersed along the edge of the woods in pairs and I am solo at the center of our line. The Osprey is assigned med-evac duty to collect any injured people and rush them to the hospital, and that makes me think we should probably get some medics to join up soon.

We clear the woods with little difficulty in only a half hour but we find out that this hive seems to be underground after a brief conversation the LTC and I enter the hole in the ground while the others fan out seeking strays and alternate access to the hive. Once in the hole we face a constant flow of hostiles but we mow them down quite efficiently. On a side note Raif recommended that the micro-missile launchers include a few nanites in their payloads so now they not only blow up but that explosion spreads the means to break the down so they cant grow into new hives. We travel further underground than I expected but why doing so three other holes have been found and each is now under guard by the time Rou and I reach the hive.

The hive is in a vaguely spherical chamber lined with the large roots and branches of the primary plant, I order up a few nanite dispersal bomb that are throw able and we quickly chuck them around the place before I break out puff the magic dragon and begin introducing the invaders to my friend death. Suffice to say the hive and all its little sprouts soon find themselves being intimately welcomed into deaths cold embrace and after that all that”s left is to wait for the nanite to do their work and pick off any returning antithesis. The squad converges as we make our why back to the town and shortly thereafter the Osprey returns form its hospital run. On the return trip I bring up the option of getting a fancier ride for us so that we can travel further faster and kill more plants in more diverse settings.

I had Raif draw up a comprehensive report on everything I had thus far learned about the threat the antithesis posed both on earth and in system, I alluded to the threat beyond the system as well and included my proposals for dealing with it all. The fist step is going to be widening the scope of Earth's planetary defense and I already had a plan for that. Instead of returning to my base we went to the army base to drop off the Osprey because it is time for an upgrade and I had already purchased the proper catalog. I ignored the attention we received upon exiting the Osprey and quickly found a big enough open space to summon our new ride, say hello to the shadow walker peoples premiere squad transport the shadow flight devastator.

This was a thing of beauty in the same shades of gray as my armor 85 feet long, 50 feet wide and 25 feet tall. It resembled a flattened egg but in terms of equipment it had 18 rapid fire singularity canons split evenly with nine topside and nine below, it had a 360 degree full spectrum long range sensor array, 200 micro-missile auto-turrets for point defense, a built in matter synth station, artificial gravity, inertial dampeners, hologram projectors,a spacial storage big enough to fit two of itself in, the ability to drop bombs to clear landing zones, and room for 35 people to ride comfortably. As soon as it appeared the topside canon deployed and began blasting at something in space. The squad and I eagerly boarded our new ride, our neural sets automatically linking up with the ships systems eliciting various exclamations from everyone as they became aware of the vessels specs. The ship shall henceforth be know as Rover.

Although the controls were similar to the Osprey they had a few extras included and Rover could out preform it to the point that if the Osprey was a slug then Rover was a humming bird, as such Raif recommended that anyone in the squad who wanted should download the training simulation. We all downloaded it, and though I caused us all minor headaches being able to learn how to fly Rover in an hour of real time was well worth it considering the simulation provided just over 250 hours of pilot experience. The point cost was great but it was well worth it. Before we set out I exited Rover and a high altitude mini-satellite drone factory that would scrub the atmosphere removing pollutants then using matter synth tech create the little satellite drones that would launch themselves in to orbit and form a grid using full spectrum sensors capable of scanning several miles into the planet with the sole purpose of detecting antithesis. With each and every satellite linked together and to my base's master control system soon the world would have access to a real time antithesis activity map. With a smile I watched the factory take off before once more boarding Rover.

Once aboard the Rover I addressed my squad I informed them that because I was low on points and needed lots of the we were going to take a leisurely flight to a place that might as well be the center of the Indian Ocean. During the journey we would eliminate every alien plant we found and one there I would place a second base, this would provide the earth with increased protection from incursion while also cleaning up the ocean by targeting any underwater antithesis an producing drones to remove pollutants. My end goal is to have six planetary defense bases, and the point of this journey is to set them up.