Gates of War - Chapter 5 (Commander SI - Multicross)

CID: Day 30.6

Upon the Teleporter’s completion, I began to pour my fabbers through and construct the usual Defense Grid, Energy, Extractor, and Storage complexes, in that order.

As they did that, I replotted the scout plane reconnaissance routes, making sure to stay out of the theoretical detection range of the orbital platform as it floated over. Since I didn’t detect any nearby threats to the Teleporter, I felt good about sending the air fabbers on that side out to a one-hundred-mile diameter from it.

Over the course of the next five hours, I went from having just a Teleporter on the landmass, to having another three basic factories, one advanced factory, five going on twelve metal extractors, about the same in generators, and enough missile batteries, and Laser towers to stop anything short of a full scale assault force by Planetary Annihilation standards.

Of important note was the setup of the Umbrella Network for this base. It was the first actual defense system I made given the orbital platform, and I had enough of them for convergence fire. Now, in case the thing decided to go all “death-from-above” on me, I had enough of my own guns to shoot it, and anything it fired, out of the sky. I needed to build my own Orbital Factories, and soon, so I can get rid of that threat.

That was when I got a blip from one of my fabber planes, which had found wreckage underground that was far more advanced than this planet was capable of creating currently. It was around eighty miles away from the base. That being said, I felt the need to see this myself, but didn’t feel like endangering myself too much by walking the whole way, so I ordered the aircraft to begin building my second Teleporter.

This took about an hour, and the fabber plane had help from a few other ones to build their end at the same speed. The sun had begun to set when my first scout plane flew over the first bit of civilization I had found, but didn’t approach due to the threat of being spotted. I set it to record, and focused on the task of connecting the Teleporter. Within moments, the Teleporter whirled up in power, and made space/time its bitch.

I stepped through and slowly lumbered over to where the planes were digging up the dirt via nanospray. Looking down into the large pit they had dug, I felt my sight “blink” as I looked upon what was obviously some kind of advanced building structure. Buried for quite awhile. Carbon dating scans put it around...740+ years. I had no idea who made this, but I knew one thing...it wasn’t Progenitor. It was certainly human however. I could see the remaining English letters that hadn’t been faded and absorbed by the elements of its submersion, and it appeared to be some form of business. There were remnants of technology in there. Badly degraded, but salvageable enough for me to garner an idea of what they were capable of.

The level was Class-C2. Advanced material sciences, power generation, computer designs. The Star Trek movies with Shatner and friends was a good example of where this was. So, whoever buried this place wasn't someone to mess with...which made me think of the orbital platform. Maybe they did this? Maybe not? I didn’t have enough data, so it was pointless to guess.

Ah...I just felt my first advanced Bot Fabber walk off the line. I had it begin building an orbital launcher. Soon I will be able to build orbital assets, take care of the platforms up there, and set about getting a good look at the world from above.

Speaking of which.

I turned and went back to the Undersea base, allowing the planes to take the ruins apart and to me for study as I looked over the plane’s recon footage.

It was evening now, and the lights of torches in the cities that were still awake, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the inhabitants of the world was none other than humanity. Human Beings in a medieval society, approximately 16th century according to scans. Galley’s were the main vessels, and not merchantman and the like. Gunpowder weapons were of the sort found at the beginning of that form of warfare, but sword, shield and arrow were still commonplace. Evidently there were quite a few of religious facilities and churches, as well as the usual farming and fishing industries of the time.

Yeah...this was in no way a threat to me. I could just ignore them and not even bother. Just piss off near the ass end of the planet and brood forever ...okay I wasn’t going to do that, but I could if I wanted to.

That was strange given the Orbital, and the various signals my planes were detecting from the north continent to the northwest of here. Looking at the city in question, it was clearly some kind of religious center with the huge cathedral that reminded me of the Vatican. Much bigger though. It might be a control center, or something to talk to the ground from the orbital. Can’t be sure until I go there, or at least crack the signal encryption, when I get around to it.

It was about then one of my scout planes detected a spike in the signals from the sky, that relayed to the not-vatican, which then started sending a surge of signals to the platform.

Okay...now I’m concerned. What the hell just...and one of my scout planes just got blown to hell. Specifically, the one flying over the ocean southwest of the continent with not-vatican. According to its last moment, the sensors detected a single laser strike. I had no eyes in the sky now in that region. I was blind and for all I know the damned thing was coming right to me.

I quickly ordered my bot fabbers to speed up the process of building the orbital launcher, along with canceling all factory production, and pulling a half dozen vehicle fabs to help out on the orbital launcher. I also shut down the Teleporter to the base so as to not get caught up in whatever hell it may get hit with. I also diverted all the scout planes to the west, and set a flight path to converge upon the continent northwest of me, and south of the north continent with not-vatican.

Within twenty minutes the Orbital launcher was halfway done, just as the planes reached their patrol paths and send back data. I was able to see the platform and it had shifted its orbital trajectory slightly. It was now flying along the equator, moving at 1.5 kps, covering 5400 kilometers per hour. Slow, but it was actively scanning the ground with deep penetration radar. The other laser/missile satellites continued their paths and positions. They were static defenses it appeared. Small favors, as I will only have to deal with the one big platform instead of dozens of smaller laser sats as well. At its current speed, it would detect my land base in about one hour and twenty minutes.

Once the orbital launcher was finished, I immediately set it to build up avengers, and was pleased to find it was able to make a single unit in approximately ten minutes. Starting up a second Orbital Launcher, with all the ground fabbers, the advanced bot fabber, and now a few flying fabbers I recalled allowed me to create the new orbital in about twenty minutes, allowing me to have two avengers. It was strange, as they were in full view of the laser satellites, and were well within range, until I realized that they had full jamming systems operational, unlike the scouts, and were outright blocking the laser sats from getting a reading. They were shifting in their general direction enough to know they were there, just not where.

The metal and energy were in the green, and still good to go when I started on the third and fourth orbital launchers, allowing the avengers to just pour out. By the time I had them finished, the scout planes had all been wiped from the face of the planet, and the damned platform made a beeline towards my surface base.

Fortunately, I had eighteen avengers on their way to it, plus two more being made.

With little more to do than restart production, I watched the upcoming attack.

The Avengers flew in formation and quickly cross the distance between the base and the platform, accelerating up to 5 km/s, or 18,000 kph before slowing down in a retroburn. This allowed to reach the target in exactly six minutes and twenty seconds. At the two-minute mark however, while the laser satellites were unable to really target the Avenger craft, the orbital platform had better eyes, and started firing upon my fighters. It destroyed a few of my fighters in the first salvo as they tried to avoid the shots. The high velocity of the railgun slugs covered the 1,800-kilometer distance in less than two and a half seconds. I open a few dozen lines of thought to do the math and quickly figured out how fast it was. So, the velocity was about 0.483137438% the speed of light, or 3,400,000 miles per hour. Which means this thing could accurately strike neighboring planets if it wanted to. I felt torn between admiration and apprehension.

It may not be up to the level of some other things I’ve seen in other fictional works, but that’s still nothing to sneeze at. If I had the means, I would see about taking that platform, but alas I only have the fighters and that thing was barreling down on me with enough firepower to wipe even me out in a single shot. There’s always salvage though, providing I managed to blow this thing up. Speaking of which, I was four minutes from making two new Avenger’s, so even if it manages to take out my squadron, maybe I can whittle it down. If nothing else, I had sent a few air fabbers when I started making the orbital launcher, to fly to the other side of the planet and find a nice mountain range to build a new Teleporter, just in case the ground base got destroyed. At their current speed, they’ll reach it the other side in about...twenty minutes...and it will take them about thirty to build it. While I don’t necessarily need to leave my undersea base...I might need to incase this platform finds it and decides to shoot it, despite the human societies that would be wiped out in the process. I don’t know what the limit of “preserving life” on this thing is, assuming it’s programmed to do that at all.

I also finally got a good look at the platform now, full image and everything instead of just a radar return. It was...interesting...it reminded me of that satellite from that Final Fantasy movie...this wasn’t a space defense system...this was a planetary bombardment system. This was meant to shoot down upon something. It would explain why it didn’t just shoot my drop pod out of the stars when I first approached. With its fire power, and the range it had, I had no doubt it would have taken me out before I even landed had it been pointing the guns in my direction. Now to be fair, it had four guns pointing to space, but it still had seven pointing down on the planet. I’m not sure I like the people who made this, and will have words with that church when I get around to it. If I make it out of this.

The Avengers weave and bob in erratic patterns to avoid another hit, and begin firing their own lasers at 1,500 kilometers. They had a far greater range than that, but they were less effective the farther the target was. Optimal range was 150 kilometers. They only were burning scorch marks on the paint at this range, but it was enough to make the platform shift, bringing to bear most of its guns on the incoming fighters as opposed to pointing at the ground. Seven shots fired from the platform, and three Avengers explode, leaving me fourteen fighters. Twelve seconds later the platform fires again, taking out another five fighters. That was too fast a reload and charge time. It might get the fighters before they even get close.

I had to take control.

I began micromanaging the fighters myself, and made a separate line of thought for each one, thus giving each their own piloted version of myself. When The platform fired again, I had already been moving to avoid, and dodged completely. Now the platform started doing the same micromanaging as I did, each gun tracking an individual target as opposed to just firing a wall of metal.

I kept firing as the distance began to close, and the damage was becoming more prevalent with each shot. It fired again, but it just couldn't track fast enough on the more agile fighter craft. Soon I got within optimal firing range and fired away. Portions of the platform exploded in shards and heated metal as imperfections of the metal, and internals combusted. Of course, point defense came online with hundreds of smaller guns firing into the open space, sending thousands of brightened bolts out towards the Avenger Squadron.

The hail of fire managed to get four, leaving me with only five fighters. If I had teeth, I’d be gritting them as I brought them inside of the defenses, destroying the point defense guns, and blowing new holes into the structure of the platform. At this range, I was finally able to find some weakness in the damned platform, in the form of the propellant storage in the center of the structure. So, I was forced to pull away from the hull and go up to the ‘top’ of the platform, exposing the remaining fighters to the defenses. I lost another two, down to only three, and about a minute away from two more avengers being launched into space.

Pointing nose down, and accelerated at full burn. All three fighters fired two shots simultaneously each into the portion of the hull where the storage would have been. The shots did the job in punching through, and the seventeen-ton fighters turned “high speed penetrators”, crashing explosively through the hull at 11 km/s, one after the other with the force of 223 tons of TNT each. The effects were...spectacular.

The propellent, of a concoction I wasn’t entirely certain of, was rather explosive when exposed to fire. There had to be oxygen involved since there was a fiery explosion at all, in space, where there isn’t oxygen to be had. The center of the platform puffed outwards like a balloon for a moment, before an enormous yellow and white torch of flame erupted from the hole the fighters had made. This in turn caused the whole platform to thrust towards the planet, lowering its altitude from 3,000, to being in range of my umbrella’s 2,600 kilometers.

So, it was awe inspiring to suddenly see over twenty ground-based energy cannons fire in unison upon the large platform. They struck with what I could imagine being thunderous force as the bolts blasted apart the hull and internal structure. For a full seven seconds, I watched as the Umbrella network tore the Orbital apart until it was nothing more than glowing pieces of scrap, blown apart by the explosion of the fuel no longer being contained. Nothing more than scrap for me to reclaim.

I won. Huzzah...and I am numb in the fact I just won. If I could however...I would be grinning.

That was cool...if nail bitingly stressful.

Now that I didn’t have a damned Orbital Kinetic Artillery Platform about to kill my ass...I need to build up...and remove the other satellites, and then take what’s left of that thing for myself. Then find out who made all of them and have some words in person.

Yep...sounds like a plan. Back to work then.