Coronel learned that he’d spent an entire hour going nowhere—or that was what he thought, before he looked over his shoulder and spotted some juicy words:
—Quezon City Disaster Risk Management and Coordinating Council (QCDRMCC) Control Center
It was a lot of words, but they meant everything to him.
He pushed a message to the network, “Move to the rally point and begin rearmament. ETA 1h30m,” then he set a surveillance micro-drone to cling to the facade.
He moved into the building, a simple three-story office of brutalist architecture, no more than twenty meters across its front side. A contiguous array of window panes fronted each floor, made opaque by stuck leaves and crusts of dust.
Glass bits cracked under his boot as he stepped through the smashed door. A loyal Bernard fab-bot and a Wolfbot followed behind.
He sent a trio of micro-drones to map the branching of the corridors, and when that was done, they followed the stairs upwards and entered any opened rooms.
The first floor wasn’t interesting. After a curt reception desk was a hall with rooms to either side for maintenance and staff. There was also a small conference room with a U-shaped table. No hostiles or survivors found.
The drones slotted themselves through gaps in the second floor hallway’s security shutter, but were stopped by glass walls. Still, they were able to scan a little bit of the command center on the other side, which was replete with huge screens and consoles, all powerless and offline.
The drones couldn’t access the third floor at all, blocked by a sheet steel door at the top of the stairs.
Coronel prioritize securing the third floor. Reaching the door, he slipped a fistful of baby snake-eyes. They slithered under the door, discovering what was on the other side.
This time, he didn’t have to suffer 80p resolution. The snake-eyes sent back their visual data, and Coronel’s AI pieced them together into a more coherent picture of the room.
Going by this planet’s technology level, he must have been seeing server racks, some generator sets, and a pile of spare parts for communications equipment, including disassembled antenna arrays. No hostiles or survivors found.
He ascended the final set of stairs to the roof. It had an electronic card lock, which he was thankful for. Doorkicking was becoming a chore. A little bit of variety soothed the mind.
He recomposed an SMR swarm to primarily include scanning, control, and fuel carrier maxites, then sent a small cloud of it into the lock’s depths. It only took them two seconds to pipe enough data about the lock’s innards for Coronel’s AI to give him a quick rundown.
Turned out he didn’t even need to crack any sort of encryption, not when he could just bypass the whole authentication step, and forcibly switch on the magnetic motor. With the wave of a hand, a wire of nanites shorted out a certain contact pin, and the lock disengaged, welcoming him right through.
As expected, the roof had relatively large antenna arrays. Not just rod antennas, but dish antennas, too. Some of them were pointed at a rather tall building in the distance—ah, they’re bouncing signals off of it. No hostiles or survivors found.
As long as the transmission antennas never went on, the control center should remain undetected—in the day. The servers and computing units would produce detectable heat at night, and he’d rather not take the risk of detection by Kartesian forces.
He placed a laser relay on the roof, right on top of the roof access shed, before he returned to the second floor, disengaging the locks of the shutter and the glass door beyond it.
The fab-bot’s scanner swarms finally combed through the whole building, holding every sub-system to account. Alliance swarm computech grafted itself over most of the components, crawling over the server racks and cables like shimmering blue-black vines, plugging themselves into hardware ports like it was natural.
Coronel gave the boot order. The generators came to life, and LED’s blinked past thin layers of dust.
The large screens in front of him came to life. They all said “Kernel error,” in white, left-aligned, monospaced text on a black background, zero-pixel margin on all sides.
Thankfully, one of the computing units held a more updated copy of the operating system. Coronel’s AI directed the software update, carefully making backups and backups of those backups, taking an entire 20 minutes to sort through the heap of bullshit its master was putting it through.
Honestly, it could do it faster, but this planet’s hardware was just too slow.
Coronel felt his AI grumbling in the way the symcode was redundantly recompiling. He could see its little warning logs scrolling by in the corner of his vision.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
He nodded. His AI deserved a hardware update after this.
Finally, the control center properly came to life this time, the screens flickering on with grainy moving pictures.
Coronel clicked his tongue. Only 20% of the feeds were still intact.
Still, 20% was better than none.
Because one of those cameras caught a Lanan patrol craft surveying the city.
***
The Kartesh wore pride on their nondescript faces. No one had ever seen one, after all, but evidence of their pride and infuriating smugness was written all over the battlefield. Another thing, however, was how little they cared about how their thralls presented themselves. When they looked at their servants and slaves, all they expected was efficiency: to get the job done, with the least cost.
The Lanan were among those slaves, and human Lanan were among the most prized. They were versatile, creative, and best of all, obedient to a fault. They would even take the initiative to construct entire narratives in their minds just to justify obedience to their masters.
That was, perhaps, the only thing that really set them apart from a true human. All their lives and intellect were spent towards loyalty and obedience. Anything else was a side effect—like their stinginess in war.
Resources weren’t infinite, that much was always true. Which division, which unit, which squad would be allocated which equipment? Who needed it the most? Who could use it the best?
The higher-performing you were, the higher your priority became on getting better equipment.
The more you were confronted with increasingly powerful enemies, higher still was your priority jumped.
Which was why, until Kartesian forces weren’t able to establish a decent industrial and logistical base in any operating area, the vast majority of Lanan sent to fight on the frontlines were equipped with tech slapped together from the wastes of the last century.
Three such Lanan were currently hovering 100 meters over the streets of Quezon City, pointing their IR and RF scanners all around, hoping for a decent trace of the enemy.
Their vehicle, a pickup truck with slapped-on plasma thrusters and repeating railguns on either side, would most likely explode brilliantly with a lucky shot from a potato gun. On the other hand, each side gunner could level a small office building with a sustained 15-second barrage.
All in all, it was perfectly balanced. They just wished they weren’t flying an unarmored fuel tanker. Even if they were wearing power armor capable of sustaining a head-on collision with a crashing airplane, the person inside wouldn’t.
“I’m getting something on RF,” the left gunner said over squad comms.
“You’re always getting something on RF!” the driver remarked. “Some of the city’s infrastructure’s still functioning. You gotta filter out the 2.4 and 5 GHz frequencies or it’s just all noise.”
“I ain’t dumb.”
“Yeah, you are,” the right gunner quipped. “IR’s no good in the day. Heat island effect’s too bad and our resolution’s too shitty to spot a frying egg down there.”
“Just toss the drones overboard already and let ’em do the job!” the driver said.
“We saved up for these for a whole month, you know!” the left gunner protested.
“We answered the call and now we gotta do it, okay?” the driver replied. “Look, we’ll toss over the drones, find the survivors, hammer down with the rails, then we’ll get enough points back to buy new ones. Sounds good, yeah?”
“Wait, the mission reward’s just 1000 points for this one,” the right gunner said. “Each drone is 100 points—”
The driver shook his head. “Then toss out five drones, damn. I can’t be telling ya how to do a cost-benefit analysis each time!”
“Let’s just circle around a bit more, then we’ll try with the drones,” the right gunner said. The left gunner enthusiastically agreed, pissing off the other two with how loud he was about it.
They were circling over a 3 km radius from the site where Coronel and the pilots had taken out the horde when the left gunner noticed something odd.
“Hey, I’m getting something on the 10.1 GHz,” he said.
“Isn’t that an Alliance frequency? Alright, I’ll get us in closer—”
The rear-right engine blew up in a steel-crunching bang, cutting off the driver’s words. The gunners were tossed around, kept in place by straps just in case something like this ever happened. The other engines wheezed and strained, making up for the loss of their sibling.
Sudden it may have been, the driver regained control after only a little loss in altitude. The gunners, meanwhile, already had a bead on the source of the attack.
“Cannon report triangulated!” the right gunner said. “Left gunner, it’s on your side!”
“I can see that! Salvo ready! Permission to fire—”
“Fire, damn it!” the driver shouted.
The left gunner aimed down nearly forty-five degrees and willed his armaments to fire. Twin railguns, mounted on top of each other, fired alternately with hums and sharp cracks as ten pea-sized projectiles a second broke the sound barrier, precisely targeted on the critical points of the target structure. It was like breaking all the bones of an enemy in cold, quick succession.
The space between the ground and the gun wobbled like a mirage and turned white with shockwaves, like foam from crashing waves, from the sheer number of sonic booms per second.
After a short salvo of 103 rounds, the two-story apartment collapsed in on itself.
Anyone within ten kilometers would have heard this short exchanged as an overly-long rolling thunder, followed by a crash.
“Target dispatched,” the left gunner said.
“You see anyone down there?” the driver asked.
“That’s…a negative. I’m just assuming they were inside—”
“Ain’t enough. If you can’t find a body, they’re still alive.”
“Sir?…”
“We’re switching to terrestrial. We’re sitting ducks out here—”
Another explosion, taking out the rear-left engine, made them scream curses before the driver screamed “Fuck my life!” and deployed parachutes. With the remaining engines, he maneuvered the vehicle to settle down on an empty street. The parachutes snagged on a few poles and lines, but with another press of a button, they vaporized, leaving just the vehicle behind.
Although the engines had been taken out, the wheels had been safely tucked away in armored compartments and spared. Even if the enemy rounds had pierced through and damaged the wheels, they’d need to directly hit the in-hub motors to completely disable them.
Wheels pushed down from under the vehicle, officially welcoming them to the horrors of being stranded in enemy territory.
With their arrogance and carefree attitudes stripped away along with their aero-engines, the Kartesian infantrymen rolled along steadily down the street, ignored by their thralls, the Alphas and Betas.