Sarla fired another fireball at the approaching army. Her group had entered this human “dungeon” only two hours ago, and already she was running out of mana. They had taken the teleporter into the one simulator the humans had so far finished building, a fort defense simulation. Soon after they arrived they were told that a GCA army was approaching, and that they needed to defend the base. For motivation, around a hundred robots designed to look like humans, armed with rail pistols, had been provided, and were playing the role of a civilian militia trying to defend their homes. At least, the ones that were still left were playing that roll. Eighty three of them were destroyed or damaged enough that they couldn’t keep going.
Over half of the twenty-four Alf crew she had come here with had also “died”. They were all equipped with emergency teleport devices which teleported them to the medical facility as soon as as they were badly injured, so none had actually died, but they had come close. The human soldiers that did this mission had informed us that they didn’t use the bracelets, instead relying on their healing abilities and emergency clones to make it more realistic, but as we didn’t have either of those, we had to use the teleporters. I did actually have a clone out there, the last body I was in, but I would only be returning to it if I was discovered and died, probably via suicide as they would no doubt wish to interrogate me. After what Lord Vidar had done, there was no chance that they would break me, but I didn’t want to let them know how resilient we were.
This battle was apparently based on the two battles they had fought against the GCA so far, using Grilk and Solin troops mixed with a variety of quadrupedal predators. The number of enemies, however, made me even less sure how they beat me.
“Out of mana!” yelled the mage beside me, using the human name for charged nanites, before drawing a rail pistol and continuing to fire. We had all been given one for use in emergencies, but at the time I had doubted I would need to use it. Now, however, I knew that I would use it soon. I could only hold out for a few more minutes myself.
“Jotun!” yelled another and I looked up to see three of the alfinoids approaching. I knew that they were clones under the control of the outpost core which ran this simulation, and were therefore brainless, but the thought of having to face one still terrified me.
“Firing on the Jotun!” I yelled as I charged up the densest firebolt I could make. Soon the chemicals in the air started splitting and everything became a plasma, but I kept pushing energy into it. The energy of the plasma grew higher and higher as it shifted in the color spectrum. And the enemy kept getting closer. When they were around thirty meters away I received a notification that a fusion event had been detected within the plasma. That should be hot enough. I held the attack until they got within twenty meters, my effective range, and I fired it at the chest of the center one.
The explosion knocked me off of my feet, along with several others on the wall, and the wind almost blew me off the walkway I had been standing on. I got back up, noticing that I had minor burns from the explosion and looked at the corpses of the Jotun. One was in pieces no larger than my fist, one was on fire and not moving, and one had been blow towards the wall, and was laying against it. I could see its chest moving, so I knew it was still alive, if barely. It was basically drooling blood, so it would die soon.
The other creatures that were around it had all been killed or knocked over, while those slightly further away had tried to take cover. Now those that could were standing up. I checked my nanite levels. They were practically empty. Having no other option, I hung my staff on my back and drew my pistol. Slowly my squadmates were getting up and firing on the enemy as well. The enemy tried to fight back but only managed to take out two of us before they were all killed.
We received a congratulatory message from the outpost core, and were teleported back to the staging area. Most of my squadmates were there, with only two still being in the clinic for treatment. “Congratulations.” said a large human man, the commander of the base whose training field we were using, named Paul. “That was essentially a recreation of the defense of Fort Solinan, only we slowed down the enemy advance. The original battle only lasted one hour, while the simulation gives you two.” Now that I thought about it, the distribution of enemies was almost exactly what I had sent at them.
Several of the others looked surprised. “We could barely keep up. How did you handle them?”
“We didn’t. The wall got knocked down, and most of us died, at least temporarily. I ended up fighting a Jotun and almost getting beat to death, while over a thousand Solin and several hundred Grilk entered the town and killed over half the residents.”
“But you won.” I said. “They enemy was killed.”
“We got lucky. The mayor happened to figure out a way to wipe out the enemy in one attack.”
“How, though?” another man asked. Good, I didn’t have to ask and risk suspicion.
“That would be a secret, one that he refuses to tell anyone. What I can tell you is that using it was a traumatic experience for him, so he’s unlikely to use it again.”
Who gets traumatized by winning a battle in a spectacular fashion? Were they lead by a weakling?
After we discussed the combat scenario and what we could have done different, like increasing our mana stores or using more efficient spells, we left and returned to the main town. The mayor had recently installed a portal in the town, which could be a possible way to bypass the town’s defenses, but judging by how he only allowed human and select non-human settlements to connect to his teleporters, he had likely done the same thing with the portal. Still, it was worth testing.
Paul had contacted the main bar/brothel for the town and deposited one thousand zerka to cover our expenses, so the others in my squadron had decided to celebrate our victory. I disliked celebrating with others. In fact, it was one of my least favorite social activities. But I had to keep up appearances, so I went with them. I ordered some sort of alcoholic beverage and a meal, some sort of grilled red meat with various vegtables as sides, and pretended to enjoy myself. I also fought the urge to vomit when I saw several of the men there leave for a back room with some of the human prostitutes that were working there. There was a Snow Alf woman working here, and they ignored her, which made it even more disgusting. How could they have that kind of thoughts about a member of another species? I knew that if I was forced to choose, I would choose the snow alf woman rather than a human man. Not that I was particularly interested in other women, but at lest she was the same species if not the same race. That made the idea of being with her bearable, at least.
An hour later, after watching the others embarrass themselves, I claimed that I was tired and needed to leave. I couldn’t put up with their behavior any longer. I walked by the nearby Arch and quickly had my assistant look over its programming. It was, indeed, locked, this time with a set of special codes. The mayor would use these codes to set up the arches in his colonies on other planets in the star system, allowing them to connect to this place.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
With that possibility ended, I went back to Fort Solinan. At least the people there weren’t that perverted and I could stand to be around them.
Greg’s Perspective:
When I woke up Vera notified me that one of the teleportation orbs had found a cavern about seventeen kilometers below the ground. I quickly connected to the orb and sent it another one, with instructions to send nanites to repair the orb if it couldn't form a connection with it after sending the orb into the cavern. A minute later I received a message that the orb had been sent, but that it hadn’t responded afterwords. Repair nanites had been sent.
After that I checked in on the various cities. As it had only been a few days, all of them were still in the initial expansion phase and therefore hadn’t started to build the living facilities yet. Until there was a pressurized area, I couldn’t set up the Arch and return home. Though I suppose I could just fly back to Earth. It was less than an hour journey, and over the last three days the ship’s nuclear reactor had managed to refill the ship’s energy reserves, so I could easily make it back.
Around ten in the morning I got a signal from the deep teleportation orb. It had been damaged by the teleport, but was now back online and could move things once again. I asked for information on it surroundings and, after verifying that the lava tube it was in was large enough to hold the World System Core, and was in fact large enough to hold this ship, I sent one of the special ones I had in storage to it. This one would build the first secret base I needed to protect humanity.
It asked for a name. As it was on the Moon, and this base would be responsible for saving lives, I considered naming it Apollo followed by a number, as I would build more of them. Then I thought of its purpose. Was I trying to build another sanctuary? A place for humanity to hide? Was I building a secret storage area for clones, so that they couldn’t be destroyed? Was I building a military base, where we could learn to protect ourselves? While I was certain I would need to do all three eventually, the people weren’t under attack at the moment and those sanctuary bases would be best on Earth, so that people could escape more easily. The military base would also likely be best on Earth, as that was where the fighters were, as well as the enemy. The clones, however, could be anywhere. I could build a facility out in the kuiper belt or in the andromeda galaxy and they would both work equally well, other than the need to return the people to Earth after they came back. So, keeping with the Greek theme, I named it Prometheus after a titan that was famous for dying and coming back. The housing facilities of the base could be used for those that required physical rehabilitation or psychological help after dying.
A week later another orb notified me that it had found a location and a day after that another one reported the same thing. I sent orbs down to these, but held off on the World System Cores. Ideally, I would want all of these to be filled so that we had emergency shelters. But how many would I need on the moon? Until the cities were built, we wouldn’t need to clone anyone, but back on Earth we would need other facilities.
I sent the twenty or so teleportation orbs I still had left to Prometheus, instructing it to continue scanning for underground locations where we could build bases, and sending the orbs to those locations. I also told it to make more teleportation orbs when in could spare the Nanite Forge time and keep scanning deeper. Hopefully, when I returned, I would have hundreds or thousands of locations to set up bases, and could choose them at random just in case anyone got hold of my scans, however unlikely that was.
As Shackleton had already built a pressurized area, I flew there. The Core had teleporter functionality, so I would be able to teleport to the town, but I didn’t trust it. I shoved the Arch into my Inventory 3, the device only fitting because it was in a broken-down, prefabricated state, and flew to the settlement. I sat down on one of the landing pads that were built there, put on my pressure suit, and exited the ship.
The bottom of the crater had several landing pads, with many more under construction, from the size needed for my small ship to those big enough for a Capital ship. Only the moon’s low gravity made it possible to land the last one. This base would have the capability of building ships once it was finished, so it had decided that such landing pads would be needed. My ship’s fuel was rapidly refilled from the base’s hydrogen reserves, and I was sent instructions for entering the colony.
After entering the airlock I was scrubbed of the local regolith and allowed to enter through an automatic airlock, gravity slowly increasing until it was equal to Earth’s as the airlock pressurized. It opened into an area that reminded me of an airport, with baggage areas and cargo areas. Any cargo could be offloaded via teleporter, but there were also loading robots in case the customer didn’t wish to do so. All ticketing and cargo handling would be handled by the Core, so no employees were needed, though some could work here if they wished.
I took a moving walkway one kilometer into the side of the crater and entered an open area that looked kind of like a mall plaza. There were stores built into the walls, including places that were clearly set up for food service, with the appropriate System devices in all locations, including Food Warehouses or standard Warehouses as appropriate, and local food service or sales terminals at all of the shops. Again, no one was technically required to work anywhere, but they could if they wanted.
Once you got out of the shopping area you entered an area full of parks, with a massive fountain in the middle. In a plaza beside that park was an area set aside for a small Arch. Arches were technically half circles which could anchor a type of wormhole at their bottom center. As you exited the wormhole in the same orientation you entered it, entering the top half on one world would have you exit the top half of another. Technically, the other half of the wormhole was also created, but as it was only microns wide the only effect would be a line cut into the stone beneath the Arch. Arches came in many sizes, starting from the most common five meter diameter one and increasing by five meters at a time for each successive size. Well, not exactly five meters, but an alien measurement that was close enough for casual conversation. The small one was all that was needed to move people, but large vehicles and cargo might need a larger one.
I gave the Arch in my inventory to the city’s Core, and it set it up in less than a minute. I then sent the arch one of the prearranged codes which I had created for the lunar colonies and had it connect to AR. A few seconds later it shimmered and I saw an image of the city. Wormholes didn’t do this by default, but neither did they keep your orientation by default. Thankfully this had been added to the Arches. Seeing that I had connected, several people had gathered around the Arch. I sent the press a message that I would be stepping through the portal in one hour and deactivated it. I now knew that it worked, and that I could return to Earth whenever I wanted. I just needed to get ready.
An hour later I had equipped the best outfit I had remembered to bring with me and I had prepared a list of things I wanted Vera to buy from the System and put in my inventory once we returned to Earth. That would include ten medium teleporters, though five of those were set to not connect to another teleporter unless I told it to, as I didn’t want them to be detected. To hide the connection signals that would normally be sent through hyperspace, all would be modified with quantum entanglement orbs that would let them connect to Prometheus’s teleporter. As these would be too massive to be stored in my personal inventory, Gary could use the Arch as a relay to send them here, and Shackleton could place all but its own in my ship’s cargo hold.
I opened up the Arch and stepped through. A large crowd had gathered, and many film crews were there. I gave a short speech about how humanity could now begin its destiny to live among the stars, a speech I had Vera write for me as I wasn’t that good at such things, then spent the next hour answering questions about the lunar colonies. Once I had finished I invited them to travel to the colony and see it for themselves. The air pressure and mixture had been matched to Earth’s by Shackleton, so they wouldn’t need to bring anything special. I set travel to Shackleton to be free for the next week, and let Gary set the prices after that week, then opened it and went through.
People quickly spread out and looked over everything. They were surprised by how much it looked like a modern city, and even more surprised by how the shopping district looked like a mall. Apparently Shackleton had looked through its files of Earth cultures and decided that was the culturally appropriate way to build a shopping district.
While the housing wasn’t yet finished, most of the rest of the city was, so the people quickly spread out. The shops were full of System produced goods, including weapons and armor, and there were even locations set aside for android and robot merchants, though they didn’t have much stock at the moment. When night fell, I learned that Shackleton had anticipated that this might be a tourist town, as it would effectively be the capital of the world, so it had built multiple hotels for people to stay in, from the kind of pod hotels you would see in busy cities like Tokyo, to luxurious hotels that would be five-star rated once a rating board saw them. All of these were “manned” by androids, which is why the vendor was currently low on stock.
I briefly considered having Shackleton build a dungeon, but decided to wait. If the people wanted it, I could do so, but as this was set up as an artistic city, having a dungeon would ruin the aesthetic. Maybe I would have him build an amusement park instead? An aquarium? A sports stadium? I wasn’t sure who was supposed to host the next Olympics, but if there was still a group overseeing that, maybe I could put in a bid for Shackleton to host it.
All of the restaurants and bars were full of food and drinks created by Shackleton in its version of a Conservation core, having already filled the city’s food stores with most items that were eaten on Earth. That was also where the plants for the parks had come from. Apparently it had already grown trees to the apparent age of two and a half years, and soon it would have fruit trees that the people could pick if they wished, or leave for the robots to clean up.