Aldric sat at the command console, reviewing the data Septimus had compiled for him.
This human Imperium of Man was seriously ill.
He felt it was necessary to establish a foothold here.
He wanted to use the players as his core force and purge the heretics.
The immediate priority was building a proper camp.
The greenskins were unpredictable, and he had no idea how many of them were out there.
If a mob came crashing into camp, the command ship could take secondary damage it couldn’t afford.
“Is this physics engine a little too realistic?”
“This puts 8K ray-traced Minecraft to shame, honestly.”
“We have to mine the stone by hand?
Brother, does it really have to be this real?”
The viewers in several streams were practically weeping with envy.
“Stellaris dev team, ten beta slots?
Ten?
You animals…”
“Watch me mine a heart shape out of this.”
“Who dropped something on the ground?”
It had fallen face-down under gravity and landed looking exactly like a lump of something unpleasant.
“Exoskeleton, activate!”
“No way, it actually works!”
A player was moving a boulder.
The thing was roughly three cubic meters and weighed somewhere around seven or eight tonnes.
After dragging it a few dozen meters, he stacked it on top of another rock.
A two-meter wall section.
Done.
From there it snowballed.
Players and clone soldiers worked like a colony of ants, hauling rocks to the camp perimeter and stacking them into a basic defensive ring.
“Exoskeleton on.
I feel like an absolute superhuman.”
“Drool, what if we put a hidden watchtower over here?”
“I feel like a house would work better.”
The exoskeleton provided players between 500 to 1000 kilograms (T/l: about 1/3 of a football feild for Americans) of assisted lifting force, along with three times their normal running speed.
Total duration was five minutes before the unit needed to return to the ship for recharging or a battery swap.
Laser cutters could slice straight through rock, though they were difficult to control and consumed energy units to operate.
Aldric’s laser sword was a custom build.
In actual interstellar warfare, no fleet commander went sprinting around the battlefield waving a sword.
The Federation would have to be completely unhinged to send a commander in with a blade.
Food was becoming a problem.
Building a single perimeter wall had pushed every clone soldier into a hungry state.
As a fleet commander, Aldric had no shortage of food himself.
The ecological command ship was essentially a large self-sustaining biosphere, cultivating fruits and vegetables in its internal farm systems.
With the bio-power grid running, the ship’s ecological cycle had stabilized enough to produce a steady yield of natural produce.
But the output from the ecological ship’s farm could not cover the consumption of an entire temporary camp full of players and clones.
The system could reliably support three to five people at most.
Beyond five, it would hold in the short term, but the longer it ran over capacity, the more likely the ecosystem was to collapse.
The greenskins.
“Septimus, route some of the higher-quality greenskin biomass into the farm system.
Send me a sample output when it’s ready.”
Humanity had spent millions of years clawing its way to the top of the food chain.
The Federation’s menu had room for everything.
Everything except humans themselves.
The Federation recognized only humans as a civilized and sapient species.
Next on the list: weapons, ammunition, armor, and medical supplies.
Medical supplies could be synthesized from extracted biomass.
The clone army’s stasis pods each came loaded with their own equipment, but stasis pod soldiers were only provisioned for three days of combat operations.
Under normal circumstances, if a logistics ship hadn’t arrived within three days, one of two things had happened.
Either the commander had been obliterated by the target civilization.
Or the logistics department had been obliterated by the commander.
“Looks like we might actually have to hand-craft ammunition.”
“Septimus, is the engineering bay intact?”
“The engineering section sustained damage, but partial equipment remains functional.”
The dimensional rift had sheared straight through the engineering bay when it cut the ship.
“Capable of supporting limited kinetic and laser weapon fabrication and modification, as well as assisted ammunition production.”
Assisted ammunition production meant hand-crafting rounds.
“So we really are doing it by hand.
I hope that doesn’t mean me personally.”
“The hand-crafting work can be assigned to players, but players alone won’t be sufficient.
Federation engineers will also be needed.”
Basic ammunition could be hand-produced without much expertise.
Advanced rounds were a different matter and required qualified engineers.
Clone soldiers didn’t have the cognitive range for it.
Combat engineers were loaded with soldier modules, not engineer modules.
“Brother, I feel so good…”
Annie was curled up on a padded seat below, running her hands back and forth across the surface with obvious satisfaction.
Neither of them was in any hurry to leave the ecological command ship.
Outside, the air was a mixture of radiation, sulfide gas, and mineral dust.
Every breath felt like iron brushes scraping through the lungs, and the bones ached just from standing in it.
The mining city’s clergy taught that this was the God-Emperor’s test for those at the bottom.
But now that they were breathing clean air, that teaching felt less certain than it ever had before.
They wanted to stay here.
The Federation felt different from the Imperium of Man they had grown up under.
The soldiers wouldn’t save them; they couldn’t even protect themselves.
He wanted to understand the Federation better.
The Federation that had saved them.
“Angel, what is the Federation?” Antor couldn’t hold the question back any longer.
“Humanity above all.
That is the Federation.”
“Humanity…
above all?”
Annie spoke up without warning.
“Then can I join the Federation?
I know how to mine.
I can mine a lot. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
Antor and I modified our shovels to fit us properly, and our efficiency is actually really high.”
“The rock-worms have never caught us.
We might look small, but the traps we built have saved us more than once…”
“Annie…” Antor’s expression tightened.
He didn’t dare want too much.
The underground of Garun Star was infested with rock-worm, savage creatures with bladed maws that claimed careless miners on a regular basis.
Hunger.
Poverty.
Constant mortal danger.
The medical pod’s scan had already told the story.
Annie’s projected lifespan would not reach 30.
Somewhere around 27 or 28, when accumulated stress and radiation finally pushed her genome past its threshold, it would simply collapse.
Death by genetic failure, by exhaustion, or by sickness.
That was the end waiting for both of them.
Aldric looked up.
His gaze settled on Annie with quiet weight.
It reminded him of something.
“Can I join the Federation?
I want to join the Federation.
I want to join the Federation assault corps.
I killed those Earth Federation xenos.
Those animals shipped our human kin into the farms.
I want to send every last one of those mongrels to a farm myself.”
“Of course you can.
We are all human.”
“Don’t go to the assault corps.
Leave the charging to the machines, the clones, the xenos slave soldiers.
Your aptitude for command is exceptional.
Go to the Officer Academy.
Study fleet command doctrine.
The Federation is short on commanders.”
Then and now, the echo was exact.
Aldric smiled.
The same smile the Federation officer had given him all those years ago.
“Of course you can.
We are all human.”
“Leave the mining behind.
Mining is work for machines.
You both have a natural aptitude for engineering.
Learn the discipline properly.
The camp is short on engineers right now.”
“One more thing.”
“My soldiers all call me Commander.”
“You can do the same.”